St. Edmund, King of East Anglia, was martyred by a hail of viking arrows in the year 869. His body was interred in the English town of Beodericsworth. His shrine, however, became a famous pilgrimage site and the town, the centre of the cult of the saint, was renamed Bury St. Edmunds. Why, then, is there a Lucan townland called St. Edmundsbury?
I am thinking on this as I walk along the laneway adjacent to the new St. Andrew’s school that takes the walker down into the heart of the lands of St. Edmundsbury. It is a morning that is completely clear save the fog puffs from my breath. There is an autumn bite to the air, making it feel as crisp as a breathmint.
There are more than a few people out walking their dogs along the laneway. A particularly narky dog stops to give the other dogs an earful – something that they clearly don’t appreciate and return the gesture, emphasized now with added teeth – the canine equivalent of an exclamation mark. Their owners haul them away with profuse apologies and unsure smiles. The dogs are reluctant and have to be dragged like burlap sacks overfilled with a particularly heavy variety of potato.
At the end of the laneway are the ruins of what was part of St. Edmundsbury farm. St. Edmundsbury house itself was built by Edmund Perry, First Earl of Limerick and Speaker of the Irish Parliament from 1771-85. He wasn’t a huge fan of the oul’ Act of Union and campaigned against it. The house and lands were purchased by Kilmainham Hospital in 1898 and were soon thereafter opened as a psychiatric unit of the hospital. The farm fed the patients. The excess crops were sold to fund the hospital. The psychiatric unit is still there and, as of 2021, there is active consideration being given to moving the entire Kilmainham operation out to the St. Edmundsbury lands. I don’t know if anything will come of it because the one thing that any search of a newspaper archive will tell you pretty quickly: there are always plans for St. Ed’s that don’t come to fruition.
A fork in the laneway before me. The main house/hospital is to the left. However, it asks people not to approach unless you are either staff or a patient. Seems like a fair ask and so I walk right.
There is an impressive visual peace to the lands here. To my left are trees with their leather-brown leaves barely hanging on. I recognise oaks, hawthorn, sycamore and even a smattering of green holly. On my right is a field that is teeming with winter cabbages. The sun is low today. It is completely unobstructed and fills every dewdrop on each cabbage leaf. I see a magpie jumping in between the cabbages, enticed in no doubt by the shiny things created by today’s sun.
The road arcs and I am now facing directly into that same beaming sun. It is positioned behind a giant post oak, making it appear as haloed and as venerated as St. Edmund himself. The trees remind me of a story I had heard once about a Lucan man in the 1950s – an O’Leary I had been told – who bought a pet monkey that he duly named Whiskey. Whiskey escaped one day from his home in the village and made for the trees of St. Ed’s. He was found when a patient, nearing the end of his treatment and believing his mental health to be improving, awoke one morning to see what appeared to be a monkey in his bathroom. I dearly hope that this story is true.
I had done a little digging into the history of St. Edmundsbury itself, but I had not been able to find much that goes back further than the 1700s. However, St. Edmund himself was venerated in Ireland from the 12th to the 15th centuries by the Anglo-Normans who lived here. Indeed, King Richard II used the three crowns of St. Edmund as the symbol of his Irish kingdom. Historian Francis Young recently researched the attempts by the Anglo Normans to have St. Edmund recognised as the Irish patron saint. Does the name St. Edmundsbury date from back then? Or is it an elaborate inside joke from Edmund Perry himself?
There is a gap in the treeline to my left. I can see the ground level fall quite dramatically into the fieldscape below, ending at the south bank of the Liffey. I stop to enjoy the view. Not even the distant hum of the M50 traffic can spoil this moment.
Soon after I move on, the road curve ends and the road ahead is straight. To my left, there are trees a short distance away. This is where the old Ballydowd Castle once stood until it was demolished in the early 1700s and replaced with Woodville, a grand house that stood until around 1970 before being demolished. The last family to live here were the Hamiltons, of whom two daughters, Eva and Letitia, went on to become artists of some note.
As I get nearer to the main road, the background noise changes as I draw nearer the traffic. Soon, I can see the back of the two eagles that adorn the entrance pillars to the St. Ed’s lands. I stop to look at them a while – something that I had never done before. Ironically, about an hour later, I will be walking down Pembroke Road on my way to the RDS and I will see precisely the same eagles atop at least two other houses from the 18th century.
I leave St. Ed’s and wonder what the future next has in store for it. Most of the lands here are currently owned by John Magnier and JP McManus. There have been attempts to redevelop it – attempts that have, thankfully, not progressed any further than paper. It may some day see an expansion of the psychiatric hospital, which would at least be a public utility from which the community as a whole would benefit. Right now, though, despite it having been the seat of great houses, a castle and having a linkage to the veneration of an Anglo-Saxon King, I think it works perfectly well as a cabbage farm.