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    The Little Book of Merrion and Booterstown
    The Little Book of Merrion and Booterstown
    The Little Book of Merrion and Booterstown
    Ebook133 pages1 hour

    The Little Book of Merrion and Booterstown

    By Hugh Oram

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTHP Ireland
    Release dateAug 6, 2018
    ISBN9780750989497
    The Little Book of Merrion and Booterstown
    Author

    Hugh Oram

    Hugh Oram is an author, broadcaster and journalist with countless articles and books to his name, who has lived and worked in Dublin for many years.

    Read more from Hugh Oram

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      The Little Book of Merrion and Booterstown - Hugh Oram

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      1

      HISTORY

      The earliest building of note in the area was Merrion Castle, which is believed to have been built around 1280. The site on which it was built is now St Mary’s Home for the Blind, just off the Merrion Road, opposite the Merrion Gates.

      The first owner of Merrion Castle was Thomas Bagod, who also owned Baggotrath Castle, which once stood where Searson’s pub is now located on Upper Baggot Street. Bagod gave his name to Lower and Upper Baggot Street. In the first century of its existence, Merrion Castle had a number of owners after Thomas Bagod. The castle itself was surrounded by fields, gardens and stables and the village of Merrion started to develop, to house all the people needed to work both in the castle and on its surrounding lands.

      Merrion Castle and Booterstown were both mentioned in the 1488 Act that defined the boundaries of the Pale, that part of Ireland centred on the then small city of Dublin, which contained the main English-occupied areas of Ireland.

      As for the name of this castle and the new village, they went under a variety of names, including Mirryyong and Meryon. It’s also possible that originally the name of Merrion had been given to this whole stretch of coastline on the southern shores of Dublin Bay. The present-day name of Merrion is an anglicisation of the Irish word for seashore, Muirbhthean.

      The original medieval castle was quite primitive and it was later replaced by a more intricate manor house. The historian F. Elrington Ball, who lived for part of his life in Booterstown and who is still regarded as the leading authority on the early history of Co. Dublin, wrote that in the sixteenth century Merrion Castle would have been a stately home surrounded by gardens, orchards and fields of corn. By the mid-eighteenth century, Merrion Castle had a neighbouring grand house, Elm Park House. At this stage, the castle itself appears to have been in ruins. In 1766, Gabriel Beranger did a drawing of the crenellated ruins of Merrion Castle, which is now in the safe custody of the National Library of Ireland.

      By the end of the fourteenth century, Merrion Castle had come into the possession of the Fitzwilliam family and in subsequent centuries they held much sway over the land of south Co. Dublin, as they were the predominant landlords. The Fitzwilliam line died out in 1816 and they were succeeded by the Earls of Pembroke, to whom they were related by marriage, hence the Pembroke Estates, which controlled so much of the district.

      In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Merrion became known for an entirely different reason: sea bathing. The Strand at Merrion was then ideal for this activity, and villas were built close to the shoreline; these were rented out during the summer months to visitors from Dublin. The building of a seawall at Merrion in the 1790s enabled house building in the area to expand.

      By 1841, Merrion had grown into quite a substantial village, with 523 people living in a total of seventy-two houses. The arrival of the railway line from Westland Row to Dunleary in 1834 (there was even a station at Merrion that finally closed in 1935) started to make the area much more accessible for commuters who wanted to live in a pleasant seaside atmosphere and work in Dublin city centre. When the first horse trams arrived in 1872, the commuting trend was facilitated. Many of the houses and cottages that line both sides of the Merrion Road at Merrion were built in the 1850s, an indication of how popular the district had become.

      The first major institutional development in Merrion came in the mid-1860s, when the Religious Sisters of Charity paid out the enormous sum of £2,000 for the ruins of Merrion Castle and its surrounding lands. In 1868, they opened St Mary’s Home and School for Female Blind, followed four years later, in 1872, by St Martha’s industrial school for females in the same grounds. Within a decade of its establishment, it was one of the largest industrial schools for girls in Ireland, with about 150 girls aged between 8 and

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