I have lived most of my life in Hillcrest. I moved here as a child from the old Semperit factory housing in Gallanstown. By the time we arrived, Hillcrest was a settled housing estate. Indeed, coming South from Lucan Village along the Lock Road, it was practically the only estate between here and the canal. Over the years, I have watched it grow and adapt, moving from its status as an island in a sea of quiet green fields to being an integral lynchpin in the ever-expanding communities of Lucan. If a ramble around a housing estate sounds unappealing or unadventurous, I hope to be able to change your opinion. There are stories in each step.
Hillcrest is tucked in behind the N4/Lock Road intersection where, ironically, one of the newest Lucan features, the rock cut for the traffic flyover at the intersection, reveals one of the oldest, as the limestone calp rock has been dated to some 340 million years ago. Back then, Ireland would have been located roughly where the Bahamas is today. Hillcrest – the Nassau of the North.
I enter Hillcrest Road at St. Patrick’s Church, briefly recalling the old prefab church that stood in its place until 1985. The beginning of the road is the highest part of the estate. The road itself more or less follows the line of the now disappeared entrance roadway to the old manor house of Viewmont (or Beaumont, depending on the map you reference), which stood roughly at the entrance to what is now Hillcrest Grove.
Hillcrest has aged well. What started in the 1970s as a set of buildings cloned from one another has, over the years, gradually changed into a mosaic built from different tesserae as each new coat of paint on a front door, each new individually chosen set of windows and each maturing front garden plant has brought its own diversity.
There is a remarkable set of maps that, over the years, found their way into the possession of St. Patrick’s Hospital in Kilmainham. Drawn up by Bernard Scalé, student of famed mapmaker John Roque, they map, in extraordinary detail, the lands of Lucan Manor in 1772. When I first viewed them, I was astonished to find one of the maps showed field boundaries that more or less equated to the position of many of the roads in Hillcrest today. The area that more or less equates to Hillcrest is, on the Lucan Manor maps, referred to as ‘The Wood’ – indicating perhaps the use of this area before a time when it became fields – but more of that later.
The lands between Hillcrest Green and Hillcrest Heights were, in 1772, made up of four fields, known as the ‘Dairy meadow’, the ‘Big Wood’, the ‘Brickfield’ and the ‘Green Hillfield – Meadow’. The area from Hillcrest Road to the N4 appears to be the ‘Blue Gate Field’ and ‘Mr Brown’s House and Garden’.
I consider this as I turn on to Hillcrest Avenue, bedecked as it is presently with colourful buntings to mark their recent socially distanced street party. This, I think, was all designated as ‘Brickfield’ some 250 years ago which, from my armchair historian’s eye, possibly means a place where the top layer of earth was cut into brick shapes, dried and harvested.
Near the end, where the Avenue meets the Way, I see the Common Gulls that have nested in this area in recent years on the roofs of the houses. The younger birds still show their brown feathering – though they are now the same size as the surly adults that spend their time tending to them inbetween bouts of angry screaming at other gulls. I can occasionally glimpse their nests, built in behind the chimney tops of their man made cliff faces. Gulls and humans don’t mix well, however, and the locals have told me stories of being dive bombed in their own gardens when the nestlings are at their youngest. I myself have, on occasion, heard them trundling across my own roof tiles with all the elegance and, somehow, all of the heft of several elephants.
I move now along Hillcrest Walk, itself the boundary between the townlands of Lucan and Pettycanon on the N4 side and Doddsborough on the other. Soon, I reach the football pitches, where the hedgerows surrounding it are one of the last vestiges of the 1772 farmland. Now, in July, they are a thick brawl of competing hawthorn, poet’s ivy, nettle, stickybacks, beer cans, plastic bags and grasses. There are butterflies here. There are midges – not the biting kind, but the other kind that acts like it can bite but can’t.
Looking at this thriving relic, I can’t help but wonder what was here before it – when the lands that are now Hillcrest were called ‘The Wood’. What kind of wood was it? By sheer fortuitousness, Lucan has some remarkably unique records that give us a glimpse into what might have been there. Each manor in Ireland would have held manorial courts to settle local disputes. All such records perished in fires during the Civil War in 1922. However, the only Manorial Court Rolls that still exist are the Lucan Manor rolls for the years 1442-1444. Queen’s University lecturer Dr. Sparky Booker was good enough to share some of the details of it with me. While scant, they do offer an insight:
21 Nov 1443: John Stede makes fine in 3d as he cut down the lord’s wood without licence. Nicholas Stevyn makes fine in 4d for the same.
William Eynane and Joanna, his wife, make fine in 3d for trespass in the forest. Richard White makes fine in 3d likewise.
While the wood referred to may or may not be our Hillcrest wood, it nonetheless demonstrates how protective the Manor was of its woodlands. Medieval Irish Woodlands were a not insignificant source of revenue. The woods were used for hunting. The wood itself was often harvested for building. There was money to be made from berries, mushrooms and other foodstuffs. And, most surprising of all, the mosses were often dried and sold in Dublin as a type of medieval toilet paper! The references to the woods in the Lucan Manorial Rolls make it clear that theft from a manor wood was viewed as having taken something from the local Lord.
I end my ramble at Hillcrest Shopping Centre, formerly Crazy Prices, formerly Quinnsworth, formerly 3 Guys, formerly Gubays, formerly a dairy meadow some 250 years ago, and reflect on the fact that each corner of this housing estate has a story to tell and is continuing to tell a story. If you are reading this in the Bahamas, you may have a colder future, but it will be equally as bright.