O'Connell Bridge to Parkgate Street

SECTION XIV

The Northern Quays - O’ Connell Bridge to Parkgate Street

The northern line of quays, while not really so old as the southern, enjoys the advantage of having preserved its historical memorials in much better condition. For several centuries there were very few buildings on this side of the river. It had only one parish church, S. Michan’s, and one large abbey, the Cistercian foundation dedicated to the Blessed Virgin. Considerable remains of both these structures are standing. It was not until the time of the great Ormond that the Liffey was spanned by other bridges than the original one, and the north bank began to assume its present appearance.

The first quay from O’Connell Bridge is Bachelors’ Walk once the favourite promenade of the “Bachelors” or young men of the neighbourhood. It received its name, doubtless, at a period when it was a pleasant seaward-running road below the city proper. It is now the home of the Dublin furniture trade, antique and modern. At the shop doors may often be seen peculiar low cars, consisting of a flat platform with a slight depression in its centre, and mounted on two wheels. This type of vehicle, now used for bulky loads such as furniture, is believed to be the original form of the Irish sidecar. The workmen of the city, as fond in the past as they are now of a Sunday trip to the country, used to borrow these cars from their owners and drive out sitting back to back on the boards of the platform with their legs dangling over the wheels. An old local poet thus describes the scene as it appeared in his day.

“A downy mattress on the car is laid,

The father sits beside the tender maid,

Some back to back, some side to side are placed,

The children in the centre interlaced.

By dozens thus, full many a Sunday morn,

With dangling legs the jovial crowd is borne;

Clontarf they seek, or Howth’s aspiring brow,

Or Leixlip smiling on the stream below.”

Being roomy, cheap to construct and yet substantial enough to stand the rough usage of the “rocky road to Dublin,” this flat car was soon adopted as a public conveyance. Of course - it has been improved almost out of all likeness to the “jaunting-car,” on which the workmen took their weekly jaunts. The platform has been raised and provided with rails, cushions and a footboard. But a study of the sidecar in its intermediate stages, as it appears in the prints at the National Gallery, shows its course of development.

The first considerable turning to the right of the quay is Capel Street, opposite Essex or Grattan Bridge. It is called after the family name of the Essex who built the bridge. It is instructive, as showing ancient ideals in street construction, to learn that this narrow thoroughfare was, at its formation, thought to be a ” large, noble street.”

A turning to the left off Capel Street some hundred yards from the river perpetuates the name of S. Mary’s Abbey, some remains of which are preserved in the premises of Messrs Alexander & Co. The Chapter House, which must have been a lofty and splendid room, has been divided into two stories by the building of a floor about half way up its walls. In the upper chamber, a loft used for storing sacks, the beautifully groined stone roof remains intact, looking very incongruous amidst its surroundings. The upper part of an old window is still visible. In the lower story the ancient architecture is concealed by the brickwork of wine vaults. This Chapter House is believed to be the identical place where young Silken Thomas, maddened at the news of his father’s death,

“Flung King Henry’s sword in council board King Henry’s thanes among,”

then burst wildly forth at the head of his retainers, an avowed rebel. The prison of the monastery is also shown. Its masonry, though strong, is very rough to the modern eye. The stones are of every size and shape. They form an arch so pointed that, from below, it appears almost like the intersection of two flat, rather than two curved, surfaces.

The Bank of Ireland commenced its existence in S. Mary’s Abbey, whence it removed to the old Parliament House in College Green.

The next turning to the left off Capel Street is Little Mary Street, which is the Petticoat Lane of Dublin. It is narrow, and the shops are, in the old-fashioned style, open to the street and destitute of windows. Every inch of space is utilised by the dealers for the display of their wares, so that the pedestrian passes beneath an overhanging grove composed of every kind of garment. The effect produced is midway between the picturesque and the merely bizarre.

In the neighbourhood of Capel Street the quays are called after Ormond, the great seventeenth century viceroy, to whose example and influence the northward extension of the city was due. His idea in planning the north quays was for a series of wide and pleasant riverside streets, leading to his great new park and the palace, which he purposed to build there. Sixty feet was reserved for the future highway all along the Liffey. Before Ormond’s death the greater part of the present embankment was completed.

Ormond Quay was the home of the butchers of old Dublin. On account of the uncleanliness of their trade, they had been compelled to remove thither from the city proper. Their stalls were set up in Ormond Market behind the quays, and some of the side streets here still retain the appearance of an ancient commercial centre. The bridges were often the scenes of fierce faction fights between north and south Dublin. The butchers quarrelled with almost everybody, the weavers, the collegians and the soldiers. Their dexterity with the knife earned them a bad reputation. They were said to hamstring their opponents and to perpetrate other forms of barbarous revenge. The origin of these sanguinary broils may be traced back to 1607, when Oxmantown and Thomas Street disputed about the right to a certain honourable position in the city array, whenever there was a general muster.

Beyond Ormond Quay is the Four Courts, more remarkable externally than internally, although it has a good central hall, circular in shape.

In an obscure corner at the western end of the Courts is the Public Record Office,[the picture of a portion of the dome, left, was taken before the destruction of the Four Courts in 1922. KF]  Four Courts1.jpg (19762 bytes)the little-known government department, where the official papers of seven centuries of Irish history are preserved. A few of the more remarkable documents from its huge collection have been arranged in glass cases in the centre of the treasury, or record storehouse, behind the main building. This room is a curiosity in itself, with its six tiers of galleries rising one above the other, and its one hundred and twenty separate bays or compartments, each of which contains two hundred shelves. Here is historical matter by the ton, much of it absolutely unknown to the public.

The salient feature is the series of autographs of the kings of England from Henry VIII. In some cases the parchment is embellished with a coloured portrait of the monarch. There are some gaudily illuminated accounts of the Receivers-General, officials who bore some resemblance to the present Chancellors of the Exchequer. It is to be feared that illumination is now a lost art in His Majesty’s Treasury. The poet Spenser and the essayist Addison, both of whom once held high positions in Ireland, are represented by papers bearing their signatures. Among other curiosities are the marriage licence of the Duke of Wellington and parts of the wills of Swift, Esther Johnson (Stella) and Daniel O’Connell. Owen Roe O’Neill’s signature is appended to an agreement relating to his ally, Owen Roe O’Donnell. As Earl of Tyrone, he subscribes himself “Hugh Tirone.” The oldest record shown is a grant made by Strongbow to Hamund MacThorkil, one of the dispossessed Danish royal family of Dublin.

Among the lesser objects of interest is the state musician’s bill for the performance of an ode on Queen Anne’s birthday. The total was some £16, of which the poet, whose name is not given, received £2. 6s., and the composer and singer £2 13s. 10d. each. There is, besides, the exceeding bitter complaint of “Margrett Pender,” who was attacked in Thomas Street by a band of woollen weavers, armed with “simetars,” wherewith they “cutt the gown off her back for being made of a printed cotton and linen, being the only one she had in the world to cover her nakedness.” It reads very funnily, but was, no doubt, a very serious matter for poor Margaret, the unhappy victim of trade jealousies.

The most remarkable find in the history of the Public Record Office was the discovery of a fourteenth century morality play written into the blank spaces of a set of housekeeping accounts of Christ Church Cathedral. It represents the King of Life (Rex Vivus), a man in the glow of a full-blooded existence, flattered and served by two attendant knights, Health and Strength, and a jester, Mirth. He recks not of religion, and scoffs at the power of God and Death. The Queen and the Bishop come to warn him of his errors, but are unheeded. The play is evidently working up to a tremendous catastrophe, but unfortunately the latter portion is wanting, so that it is only possible to guess at the denouement.. This piece was performed in Dublin, most probably at College Green, near six hundred years ago.

Before leaving it will be well to note the beautiful bindings shown in the side cases. They are really brilliant specimens of a bygone Dublin handicraft. The ground work is usually red, covered with a complicated, yet seldom gaudy, design in gilding. Most of these were made to contain the journals of the Irish House of Lords.

St. Michans1.gif (23865 bytes)The next turn after passing the Four Courts is Church Street, named from, and leading to the ancient church of S. Michan (pictured at right). The tower is much older than the rest of this building. It is lofty and almost black with age. The battlements at the top and the small windows at the sides show, that like most Irish churches, it was intended to be defensible in case of need. The interior contains some good carved woodwork, notably the collection of musical instruments on the front of the gallery, which is executed in such high relief, that sceptical visitors have suggested that it is composed of actual fiddles and so forth, artfully arranged and fastened in from behind. The organ, adorned with gilded cherubs’ heads, bears the date 1747.

To the right of the communion table, buried in whitewash and plaster, is an effigy bearing the crozier and ring of a bishop. It is believed to be a prelate of Danish times, interred here because the church, being consecrated to a Danish saint, had a special sanctity for the Norsemen. Close by is a penitential stool, circular in shape, with two steps leading up to it.

Before the whole congregation the “open and notorious naughty livers ’ of the past stood on this bad eminence to make their confessions of guilt and promises of repentance. It must have been a dreadful ordeal for the luckless penitent. First he had to wait in the porch, barefooted, barelegged, draped in a long, white sheet, which was not allowed to conceal the face. In this guise he entreated the prayers of the assembling worshippers from half an hour before service time until the Second Lesson. Then the officiating minister, reciting the 51st Psalm, led the sinner into church and brought him to the stool of repentance, which was placed for the occasion in a prominent position beside the pulpit, or in the middle aisle. Standing here, the penitent listened to a sermon specially aimed at his particular fault, and, at the Nicene Creed, publicly declared his transgression and offered a prayer for forgiveness. Alas for the morals of our ancestors! The sin was nearly always the same, that specially stigmatized as “deadly” by both Bible and Prayer Book.

The tower of S. Michan’s has been ascribed to the Danish period, but, from its remarkable similarity to S. Audoen’s, it is more probably twelfth century work. The Danes erected very few, if any, permanent stone buildings. Like the early settlers of North America, they preferred wooden huts or log cabins, which could be easily and quickly constructed and gave immediate protection against the inclemency of the weather and the attacks of the surrounding tribes. The ascent of the tower, though long and rendered somewhat unpleasant by pigeons, is rewarded by a very fine view of Dublin. The spectator is a hundred feet above the street level. He looks down on the dome of the Four Courts. The topography of Dublin is at once discernible, the Liffey dividing it into two even halves, the bay and the Irish Sea to the east, the mountains to the south, the dark, green woods of Phoenix Park in the in)mediate west, and further to west and north the wide level champaign country of Kildare, Louth and Meath. No better site for a watch tower could have been chosen.

However, the most remarkable feature of S. Michan’s lies underground. The earth here has the strange property of arresting decay in the bodies committed to its charge. The vaults are full of remains, that have lain there unchanged for centuries. The very faces are distinguishable. A female figure called “The Nun” and believed to be anterior to the Reformation, has just the round, well-shaped head and delicate features that one associates with Chaucer’s Prioress.

In another vault is a supposed King of Leinster, a gaunt, emaciated figure, whose sightless eyeballs seem to be concentrated in a fierce upward glare at the roof. There is a pathetic baby corpse, too, from whose plump wrists still hang the faded white ribbons of its funeral. This coffin, we are told, is over two hundred years old, and bears the date 1679, yet the very finger and toe nails of the child are still distinct. But the illusion is marred in every case by the outer appearance of the skin. It retains the softness of life, but is uniformly of a dusty brown leathery hue, like an old fawn kid glove. Where flesh lay thinly over bone, as in the case of face or hands, the preservation is wonderfully good, but the abdominal regions have usually collapsed, leaving the ribs exposed. It is a strange, but not really a very gruesome sight. The mummies of Egypt look very much the same.

There are many rival theories as to the cause of this suspension of Nature’s law of decay. One ascribes it to the peaty soil around, another to the presence of limestone, another to the effect on the soil of a primeval oak forest on the site of the church. However, it may be noticed that the vaults are absolutely dry. No vestige of moisture is ever present. This would go a long way towards accounting for the stay in the process of decomposition. Another noteworthy point is that inorganic, as well as organic, matter seems exempt. The baby’s ribbons and the velvet on the coffins, though faded, are not falling to pieces, as they would be elsewhere.

S. Michan’ S is one of the many city churchyards believed to contain the unnamed grave of Robert Emmet. It would be a singular chance, if his body were found, like the others, with the chief features preserved and the expression of the face the same as in life. The brothers Sheares, insurgent leaders from Cork, are known to be buried in the vaults.

The next quay, after passing the Four Courts and the end of Church Street, is named after the Earl of Arran, son of the first Duke of Ormond. At No 12 the great Edmund Burke was born. His oratory, splendid as it was, differed in many respects from that of his contemporaries in Ireland. Burke was rich, varied, and, perhaps, rather rhetorical. Grattan and his school were sharp and incisive, endeavouring always to concentrate their meaning in one vigorous sentence. The present generation seems to have taken Burke for its model rather than Grattan, so that Irish eloquence has become florid and exaggerated both in diction and sentiment.

At Queen Street bridge Arran Quay becomes Ellis’s Quay, off which, a little further up, is Blackhall Place. Here on the left hand side of the street is the oldest public school in Ireland, the King’s Hospital founded by Charles II. and known to many generations of Dubliners as the Bluecoat School. The present building, though ancient and impressive, is not the original schoolhouse. The old foundation saw some strange vicissitudes. Tyrconnell expelled the boys to make room for wounded and invalid French soldiers from the Jacobite army. In 1729, a parliament met on the ground floor, while the scholars, keenly interested no doubt in the stir going on below, were relegated to the upper story.

The interior of the present house is pretty in an old-world style. There are some fine corridors, with vaulted roofs, “coved” or scalloped out into a number of small cup-shaped hollows. The walls are very thick, with small-paned windows set very high. The chapel has a somewhat cold interior, relieved slightly by and old picture of the Resurrection over the communion table. The presence of any such decoration in a Protestant church in Ireland is very unusual. A huge wooden royal coat of arms marked ” C. R.” (Carolus Rex) in the dining room and a fine stucco ceiling in the board-room, together with some old pictures, are worthy of notice.

The existing uniform of the boys is quite military in cut, spoilt however by an ugly glengarry with streaming yellow ribbons. At first they wore cassocks, then in later times blue swallow-tail coats and orange waistcoats, which must have had a decidedly striking appearance. The “Blew Boys” were highly popular with the citizens, who called them in to perform important duties, such as the drawing of the winning numbers in the great lotteries. Their sports field is a part of old Oxmantown Green, the last fragment, in fact, which survives in its original grassy condition.

Returning to the quays, the last object of interest before the park is reached is the Royal Barracks, originally built two hundred years ago and still retaining portion of the old fabric, namely the small eastern square, which faces the river and contains a large clock. Before the construction of the barracks the troops were billeted out on the people, a practice both subversive of the military discipline of the soldier and burdensome to the householder. The Corporation was loud in its complaints at having to lodge and maintain the largest garrison in Ireland, a force of several thousand men.

To Chapter 15. To Chart Index.