I hadn’t intended to visit Willsbrook Park on this bitterly cold Sunday morning. I had, rather, intended to take a stroll up to the ponds at Foxes Quarries just past Lucan Sarsfields, only to discover that the road is closed for roadworks. Not sure where to go next, and knowing from the forlorn look of my dog in the rearview mirror that returning home without a walk wouldn’t be an option, I decided simply to drive until I saw somewhere worth a ramble.
That’s what eventually brought me to here – at the black wrought iron gates of Willsbrook Park. Now, Willsbrook is not a place in which I’d had much of an opportunity to ramble, making it a perfect stop for today. The park is what remains of Willsbrook House (or, to give it the name it has on old maps, ‘Wills Brook’ House). The gates are the original gates to the estate – though they were originally in a different part of the grounds.
It is peaceful as my dog and I enter. A thick blanket of leaves underfoot covers the path and yields satisfyingly beneath each step. I allow my dog to lead the way. She heads straight for a particularly large ash tree, spending what feels like an hour poking her snout in through the leaf piles and holly saplings that grow around it.
To our left, thick hedgerows mark the western boundary of the park and follow the line of Esker Park (formerly Esker Lane), a road that has appeared on maps since at least the 1760s. The lands here at that time were fields. Willsbrook House appears to have been built in the middle of the 19th century and was eventually demolished in the late 1990s. There are plenty of clues to its past on display throughout the park, however.
As our path passes a heavily wooded area, I notice what appears to be a depression in the ground in the middle of the trees. I jump into it and realise that it is an old dried up watercourse! It is still possible to see some of its old masonry lining in places. Was this a man-made water feature? Or was it perhaps constructed out of an earlier stream? Did the original Wills family name this the Wills Brook, perhaps?
As I follow it through the trees, I encounter some exceptionally tall American Red Pine trees. Although I know that there used to be a great house here, I am reminded of a little item of trivia that I learned in my days in the scouts. If you find a plant or a tree that seems out of place with its surroundings, it is possible that you are standing somewhere where there used to be a garden or house. I have often found this to be true when I am looking at a site where I know for certain that there used to be a building. The clues and shadows of the past are still there for anyone who cares to look.
Through the trees, I see an old wall that looks very like the wall to an old kitchen garden. On it is an extremely well done graffiti image of a bird. We follow it around to where it ends. Rather than vegetables and herbs, however, the walls are now filled with a very impressive-looking playground that appears a million lightyears away from the tarmac-will-break-your-fall playgrounds of my youth. I am increasingly envious that, unlike the playgrounds of the 1980s, the playgrounds of today actually seem to be designed by people who like children…
The old Willsbrook House would have backed on to this walled garden. On the side where the house would have stood, I spy a number of trees that I have not seen in Ireland before. Not knowing what they are, and, indeed, not really knowing the names of any plants or trees, I consult the app on my phone. The first tree I see is short – perhaps no more than 20 feet tall – with a leaf line that resembles a dress. It begins green before a fabulous burgundy-red-topped ending. This, I learn, is a Sweetgum. I see another tree with scabbed bark and short evergreen needles. This is a Pacific Yew.
A short distance away, I aim my phone at another tree that I do not know. It has lost all bar a few of its banana-shaped yellow leaves. This is an American Chestnut. The final tree that catches my eye appears to have blueish green short leafspines and, in the cloudlight, appears almost furry. This is a Colorado Blue Spruce. Whoever designed these gardens must have had a grá for North America. The aspect of the house may have faced east, but it’s heart, it would appear, was very much tied to the distant west.
I enter into a large green area – an area that I thought was a football pitch, but I see no goalposts. On the other side, I see the footbridge over the N4 to Esker Lane. I had read accounts of eyewitnesses to a planecrash around here in October 1956, when a Tiger Moth plane crashed in a nearby field (Leonard’s field), clipping some of the trees in Willsbrook before it hit the ground. Both pilots sadly lost their lives that day.
I feel my greyhound pull on the lead. As I look to my left. I see two squirrels bustling up and down and up and down a tree trunk. My dog wants one. I decline to assist her. I suddenly remember reading about a foxhunt that took place on these lands in about 1895. I had read about the chase pursuing a fox across Ballyowen to Willsbrook. Thankfully, there is no ‘hunt’ in Lucan any more, although this barbaric activity still persists in Ireland (I had the misfortune to find a de-tailed fox carcass a few years ago on a hike in Wicklow). There are still memories of such things on the Lucan landscape.
I take my time trudging through the leaves on my way back to the old iron gates. Indeed, it was roughly at these gates where Esker Cottage, home to home to the original Wills family, once stood, and I end my ramble where the story of Willsbrook estate began.