It is July and the weather isn’t playing ball. It’s wetter than it should be during the day, but still hot and bothersome at night. It’s impossible to predict what the weather is going to do from one hour to the next. When I set out to ramble through Lucan Village on this Sunday morning, it feels like it wants to rain – but then, it felt like that for much of yesterday too and it never came to pass. I decide to brave it and, if I get wet, I get wet.
I start at the Griffeen Bridge beside Lucan Park, heaving with leaves and green things in the close summer’s weather and begin walking up Main Street. The Main Street wasn’t always here. I’m not a historian, but as I understand it, the street used to turn roughly where Kenny’s is today and run to the old ruined bridge in the Italian Embassy grounds. Agmondisham Vesey built a new road and bridge over the Griffeen – the road that we now know as Main Street – in the 18th century as a quid pro quo: the county gets a shiny new road, he gets the old road and its lands to help him with the redesign of his gardens. Indeed, at the Griffeen Bridge, it is reported that Jonathan Swift, reading Vesey’s inscription, wrote of him “Agmondisham Vesey, out of his bounty/Built a fine bridge, at the cost of the county.”
On my left, the 18th century gray stone wall of the old Lucan estate continues. On my right, Numero 6 restaurant, formerly the Ulster Bank where, approximately 35 years ago, I opened up my first bank account – not because I was a financially responsible child but because they gave you a plastic Henry Hippo savings bank.
After a few steps, I pass Lucan Presbyterian Church, which, from what I know, was once tended to by Reverend James Alexander Hamilton Irwin in the 1930’s. Irwin led what can only be called a ‘full’ life. Born in Ulster, he was an ardent supporter of De Valera, even accompanying him on his famous tour of the USA in 1920. He was arrested and imprisoned during the War of Independence for being in possession of a blunderbuss, even though it was a collector’s item dating back to the 1798 rebellion. By the time he came to Lucan in the 1930s, he continued to be highly regarded by De Valera. In fact, it is reputed that during his time in Lucan, De Valera consulted with him on the wording on freedom of religious expression in what became our national constitution. Lucan became his permanent home and he died here in 1954.
There is a small laneway to the back of the church. I ramble along it to see an old curiosity – a very large boulder protruding out from the tarmac in front of the small cottages. I have seen it speculated that this could be a trundle stone – a stone to protect the houses from the trundling of heavy drawn carts around corners in the 19th century,
I move on past the beautiful tightly-packed old houses of Sarsfield terrace, with their grey pebble dashing and red-brick window and door frames. Across the road is the main entrance to the Italian Ambassador’s residence. There is much to be written about the house within and, in particular, about it’s most famous resident, Patrick Sarsfield. But that will have to wait for another day (not least because the biography of Sarsfield that arrived in my letterbox recently turned out to be a poor and illegible photocopy!).
The terrace ends at St. Andrew’s Church, still looking precisely as it did when it was first built in 1823. Indeed, by the 19th century, Lucan housed congregations from catholicism, the Church of Ireland, the Presbyterian Church and the Methodist Church. I can’t imagine that there were many other towns in Ireland with the same span religious diversity. Indeed, this is a trait that continues in Lucan to this day.
Across the road I pass the old St. Andrew’s Schoolhouse. To the rear of it is a modern apartment block that backs on to the last standing vestige of the 1750’s Coldblow Bridge. I am now on Main Street proper. It seems that, since the beginning of Lockdown, more and more people have been discovering the simple delights on our doorsteps. The businesses in Lucan have had almost permanent queues in front of them since they reopened last year. My own 12 year old daughter walked by herself last week to the village specifically to buy sausages from Collins’ Butchers, two days after we had purchased a genuinely perfect cake from the Artisan Pantry to mark her graduation from primary school. Two years ago, I would have searched Dublin City hoping to find food of this quality without realising that it was on my doorstep all along.
To my left, and running all along this part of Main Street, is a perfectly intact Georgian terrace, known as the Mall. I had been told that this was designed by Lucan resident James Gandon, but I can’t find anything to back this up. But for the sake of a good story, let’s say he did …
The road and bridge to the Strawberry Beds run off to the left. However, the buildings of Main Street begin to sputter to an end here on my right and there is some undeveloped land behind the buildings between here and Sarsfield Park. Years ago, I had heard a rumor that it was somewhere around this part of the village that Bishop-to-be Eamonn Casey and a woman called Annie Murphy did a thing that Bishops aren’t supposed to do. Indeed, I remember her once referring to Lucan in an interview years ago.
Main Street begins to climb up Chapel Hill from this point, past the redeveloped lands of the Old Rectory and past my old school, St. Mary’s. During the lockdown I went back into the old playground one day to see if I could re-find the fossil in the stone wall that had enthralled us when we were 8 years old. We were convinced it was a lizard’s tale and, indeed, I remember it so. But I was unable to relocate it.
Back in the 1770’s, this area was known as the Long Walk. In the park to the right, there are steps that lead down to one of the old famous Spa wells in Lucan. Historically, these were known as the ‘Clay Steps’. In recent years, it was removed, but two hundred years ago, it was one of the main reasons that tourists came to Lucan. This marks the place where I end this week’s ramble and from where I will begin next week.