Through Dublin to the Sea


along Amiens Street and the North Strand; on the south bank along Fleet Street, through Trinity College, Fenian Street and Beggar’s Bush. It then spread out into a sort of muddy delta, with several channels, before joining the Dodder and sprawling out to sea in the Ringsend area.


Te story of Beggar’s Bush gives an idea of what things were like just three hundred years ago. Tere was an actual bush here, a venerable hawthorn that appears to have sur- vived into the early years of the twentieth century. It grew somewhere around what is now the junction of Lansdowne Road and Shelbourne Road. In the early eighteenth cen- tury the main port of Dublin and the principal connecting link between Britain and Ireland was the Pigeon House Harbour in Ringsend. Tere was only one road through the tidal marshes into Dublin – it went up the east bank of the Dodder, crossed it by a stone bridge in what is now Ballsbridge and proceeded on into the city. Te old haw- thorn on this road was hollow and beggars used to gather in its shelter to ambush their ‘clients’ on the busy road. As one account puts it ...


‘So passengers from all parts of the world, alighting at Ringsend, had to proceed as best they could to Dublin, and here, by the Beggar’s Bush, the beggars gathered, as


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they do in every port of the world, for their recognised prey, the foreign traveller.’


In ancient Dublin there were three fords across the Liffey. Te first was Kilmohavoc, roughly where the weir is in Islandbridge today. It could usually be crossed on foot and is said to have been used by Brian Boru on his way to the Battle of Clontarf in 1014. Ath Cliath, the hurdle ford which gives Dublin its current Irish language name of Baile Atha Cliath, was just upstream of what is now Fr. Mathew Bridge. Te third ford was near the mouth of the River Poddle which, before it was diverted into a sewer, joined the Liffey from the south on what is now Wellington Quay. It crossed the river on a ridge of rock known as Standfast Dick and, like the hurdle ford, could only be crossed on horseback at low tide. Te first bridge seems to have been a wooden structure at the site of the hurdle ford constructed around the year 1000 AD – it was certainly there for the Battle of Clontarf because it’s men- tioned as the location of several skirmishes. In 1215 King John sanctioned the building of a stone bridge at this site. As part of the construction the mouth of the Poddle was dammed (which gives Dame Street its name) causing the famous black pool to fill with silt and disappear.


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