During my travels, I have been known to take the odd detour or two to visit places with unusual names. I’ve visited the village of Cosy Corner, Wisconsin. I’ve passed through the town of Tea, South Dakota. And I’ve visited both Big Too Much Lake and the Diarrhea River in Minnesota. But arguably my favourite placename is one that is much, much closer to home – and one that I had somehow neglected to visit until now. I am, of course, writing about the townland of Passifyoucan (also ‘Pass-If-You-Can’), a townland to the north of Lucan.
Passifyoucan is a small townland located immediately above St. Catherine’s Park. It consists of one road that begins a little west of the Barberstown crossing on the Royal canal and runs until it hits the Dublin/Kildare border about one and a half kilometers to the west. If you have driven the back road from Laraghon to Clonee, you’ve definitely passed through it without even knowing.
There is no safe way to walk to Passifyoucan, and so, on a foggy Sunday morning in October, I drive up over the grand canal and turn right, parking near the canal and getting ready to ramble back. This townland, although within 5km of the large town of Lucan, is decidedly rural. There are fields. There are hedges. There are drainage ditches running alongside the road. And, surprisingly for a place with such a mysterious name, there is peace.
The hedgerows here are thick with red haw berries. There are some brambles, but their blackberries are past their prime and beginning to rot and recede. I peer over the hedgerow and look south to the distant Dublin mountains. The field immediately on the other side of the hedge has been expertly tilled.
I have not yet been able to find a definitive explanation of how this townland gained its name. Hope beer, who brew their wares out near Howth, have named a pale ale after this townland. They claim that the area was so-named after the famous 19th century highwayman Michael Collier, who moved from narrow road to narrow road ambushing lone travellers and coaches, relieving them of the burden of their wealth.
Collier was, interestingly, a real character who did, indeed, stage many a highway robbery in the Meath/Dublin/Louth/Kildare areas. It is possible that he operated in this location and, indeed, it may well be possible that this townland was named after him. There are a couple of other townlands in Ireland with similar names. They, too, tell similar stories. It may well be true.
Collier entered the folklore of the times. There were even adventure books written that depict him as a Robin Hood type of figure. Collier, however, was eventually captured and sentenced to transportation to the Caribbean. He eventually made it back to Ireland when he had served his sentence and died in obscurity in the 1840s.
Soon, I reach the intersection of the main Passinfyoucan road and the Laraghon/Clonee road. The traffic here is not peaceful and I have to use the traffic mirror here to plan a rushed scurry to the other side to where I can resume my ramble.
Many years ago, I had heard that Lord Carhampton had a gallows somewhere in this townland that he used to execute rebels during 1798. There is supposedly a stone in a field here that marks the spot. I, however, am unable to find it. It’s a little muddy underfoot today and I made the rookie mistake of wearing new shoes, so I decide not to seek out the permission of the local farmers to look for the stone on their land. I stick to the road instead.
The road on this side of Passifyoucan is narrower than on the other side. It is very easy here for an imagination to conjure up images of highwaymen hiding amongst the bushes and trees. Although it is morning, it is not bright. Still though – the only thing I have worth robbing is my iphone, and the 19th century mobile network was notoriously poor. I’m probably safe.
Soon, there is a sharp kink to the right in the road. This marks the Dublin/Kildare border. There is a hedgeline that continues to run in this direction up through the next field. In the hedgeline, there is a point where Dublin, Kildare and Meath all meet. This is known as a ‘tripoint’, a fairly rare cartographical oddity. Someone has labelled it the ‘Border Bush’ on google maps, something that brings me down a rabbithole learning all about the Great hedge of India – all of which is fascinating, but largely useless to me here in Passifyoucan.
Lucan’s Agmondisham Vesey had a map of Passifyoucan drafted in 1772. It is currently available on the South Dublin Libraries website. What it shows is that the field boundaries from then are more or less the same field boundaries that are still there today. Passifyoucan is, therefore, something of a time-capsule in that it preserves the 18th century landscape. What is particularly interesting about these maps, however, is that they were drafted 8 years before Michael Collier was born. This can only mean one thing: he was such a renowned highwayman that he was famous enough to have a townland named after him before he was born!
Fingal County has included all of these lands in a residential development plan. I don’t know if it will come to fruition, but, if it does, then these next couple of years will be the last before it gets developed to the point where it is no longer easy to imagine a highwayman hiding around every corner. In one sense, that saddens me. In another, I am realist enough to know that people can’t live in stories and legends.
As I walk back along the road towards my car, a van drives past me. The road really is narrow here. Maybe that’s all there is to the naming of the place – nothing more than an 18th century way of saying ‘Careful now!’… but it just doesn’t hold the same mystery or possibility wrapped up inside the enigmatic ‘Passifyoucan’.