For today’s ramble, I am going to take a walk through Lucan Village itself. It is hard to pinpoint where Lucan Village starts and where it ends. Over the centuries, it has changed in aspect and in orientation. For my walk today, however, I decide to start by approaching beneath the N4 underpass near the entrance to Lucan Demesne. It strikes me as an unusually appropriate place to begin as, in centuries past, there was another nearby underpass near here linking the Demesne to the Spa Hotel.
The first building that I encounter is the Annadale Cottage restaurant which, I have been told, was originally an early 1800s coach house, where coach travelers could rest or attend to weary horses along this, the old main Dublin-Galway route. The modern garage adjacent to it is therefore quite well placed!
From here, I follow the large stone wall to my left, itself a boundary wall around Lucan House, onetime dwelling place of the Sarsfield and Vesey family, now the residence of the Italian Ambassador to Ireland. The boundary wall has stood since about the 1780s. Parts of it have become unstable and a large section has collapsed in recent years, replaced with a ‘temporary’ green plastic-mesh covered metal fence.
A little further on, where the road meets the end of Tandy’s Lane, there is the outline of an old gateway in the stone wall, itself now sealed up with limestone blockwork. On the other side of this is the old 18th century bath house known as St. John’s Oratory which, I am told, although no longer used or visited, still has a functional well inside it. The well was itself probably venerated in the centuries before it was turned into a private bath house for a then-wealthy family.
On the right I now pass the Ball Alley where, according to local lore, members of the Tandy family in the 18th century would read the contents of the newspapers on the weekend to the locals who would gather here for that purpose. Although the Tandy family did live here, their relative, 1798 Rebellion Leader Napper Tandy, was not a resident.
Now, where Primrose Lane meets the road, I feel that I have arrived at Lucan Village proper. To my left, an old gatelodge into Lucan House. Across and up to my right, the James Gandon-designed facade of Lucan Garda Station hides behind the giant Weeping Willow at the front.
It is early – only about 8am on a Sunday – and Lucan has not yet woken up. The streets are peaceful and the frantic afternoon energy of the Village is still a long way off. I turn left and continue past the shops and businesses, some of which are open, some of which are still closed. I walk to the back of O’Neills Pub, where, through the iron gateway, I can see the extensive ruins of old St. Mary’s Church, complete with its ancient graveyard. The endlessly-fascinating http://www.buildingsofireland.ie website tells me that … “The nave is lit by a cusped ogee-headed, double light W window with concave chamfered jambs…” I have precisely no idea what any of that means, but I am going to try to remember it exactly so that I can impress some random American tourist who might stop me to ask directions here someday.
There is a ruined residential tower attached to the far side of the church. This is not, I am told, the ruin of Lucan Castle, the forerunner of the present Lucan House. In fact, I’m not sure that there is certainty on precisely where in this area Lucan Castle was located. Now, from what I understand, the main road out of Lucan Village used to go through what is now the area adjacent to the Vesey Arms/ Kenny’s pub and cross the river via what is now a rather spectacular ruined bridge in the grounds of the Italian Embassy. Agmondisham Vesey, however, redesigned the flow of the village and gave his land to creating the public road that is now Main Street in the 18th century, the quid-pro-quo being that he got, in return, the land on this side of the river. That part of Lucan Village is, however, for another day’s walk.
I cross the bridge over the Griffeen that the boul’ Agmondisham himself created, stopping on the other side to try and look at the hidden face of the bridge, where there are some genuinely beautiful alabaster carvings inlaid into the stone of the bridge. If you’ve never seen them before, stop and peer over!
I cross over to the diamond park in the middle of the village and take a moment to stop and admire the chainsaw carvings that have been placed here by the council in recent years. The park has matured and has become so much more than the thoughtless piece of green attached to an ugly toilet block that was here in my youth. It is a little oasis of calm in a bustling village. Recently, I found an online copy of an astonishing document from 1918 – the sale of the entire village, in lots, by the Colthurst Family. I had a reaction to the document, which lists the buildings in the village and the names of those who were renting each. In a descriptor panel, the length of lease was noted along with whether or not it would be possible for the successful bidder to change their rent. It is, literally, a document with lives for sale.
The document, although a very bleak thing, had one unexpected moment in it, when it noted that the rent for the village green was ‘one peppercorn’ per year, something that is an old term for a nominal fee – though there are still one or two places in the world with this term in their lease that still pay the peppercorn itself! It is here that I’ll end my ramble for this week, and will continue through the rest of the village next week.