Clontarf Island.

CHAPTER XIII.

CLONTARF ISLAND

It is hard to realise now, when three or four miles, of land occupy a space where once the sea flowed, what an important and conspicuous object in Dublin Bay Clontarf Island was. The name may seem a misnomer now that the Dublin City mainland has been brought, since two hundred years ago to within a short distance of the island) but it should be borne in mind that, before that time, Clontarf was the nearest point of the shore to this island, which, to this day, has always formed a portion of the Clontarf estate.

Before the North Lotts became dry land, the Island lay far out to sea from any point of the mainland, when the coast line ran from Ballybough Bridge by.Amiens Street, Beresford Place and Strand Street to the site of Essex Bridge. This may easily be verified by looking at the interesting map of Dublin in 1673 in Haliday’s History of the Scandinavian Kingdom of Dublin. The old wide harbour of Dublin contained no more prominent landmark than the Island.

Such a place, set in the deep water of the Tolka current where it joined the greateer Liffey current, must have been n a splendid point of vantage in the Battle of Clontarf, which, we are assured by the best historians, raged most fiercely around the mouth of the Tolka. The sea forces of the Danes might find the Island a convenience.

In 1538 the Prior of Kilmainham granted a lease of Clontarf, naming also this Island, to Matthew King. Although the Island, with the rest of the Clontarf possessions of Kilmainham Priory, was granted in 1600 to Sir Geoffrey Fenton and in 1608 to his son William, the King family continued in possession; for Carte’s Life of Ormonde states, that Sir Charles Coote in 1641 burned most of Clontarf town, especially Mr. George King’s house. Mr. King, having adhered to the cause of Charles I.’, was attainted, and his estates, comprising, we are told, “this manor” (of Clontarf), “Hollybrooks and the island of Clontarf,” were granted to John Blackwell, a favourite of Cromwell, who assigned his interest to John Vernon, whose descendants still possess the estate.

We find an apparently contradictory account in the Parliamentary Gazeteer of Ireland, published sixty years ago. It is there stated that Clontarf Island was granted to a certain Captain Cromwell, a kinsman of Oliver, on its forfeiture by Mr. George King. It is an odd coincidence that the Island was occupied in modern times by a man named Christopher Cromwell, as a tenant of the Vernon family. The Island is often called Cromwell’s Island by old Dublin citizens after this latter-day Cromwell, who was a publican in Beaver Street, where Cromwell’s Court still recalls his memory,

Christopher Cromwell built a wooden house on the Island at a cost of £45 and often stayed there for a week at a time, using it in fact as a kind of summer residence. This habit of his had a tragic ending. On the night of the 9th of October, 1844, the greatest storm recorded in the annals of the Port of Dublin raged. The cellars on the North Wall were flooded. The sea encroached once more on the extensive tract which had once lain under it.

The road on the East Wall was impassable, and the waves washed over the roof of the Wharf Tavern, an old house still standing where the East Road meets the sea. The constable on duty, whose beat lay under the water, watching from the nearest safe point, saw the light go out in Cromwell’s wooden house on the Island at ten o’clock.

Next day when the storm subsided, the bodies of Cromwell and his son William, a boy of ten, were found on the Island shore. The bodies had been retained there by the heavy fishing boots which they wore. But the boats had been carried as far as Annesley Bridge; while the wooden house, demolished by the storm, had been dashed against the embankment of the Great Northern Railway where it crosses the sea.

This embankment had been made only in the preceding year by Sir John McNeill, whose “Skew Bridge,” where the Railway crosses the sea road at Clontarf, was then regarded as a triumph of engineering. Thus the line endured its worst trial when only just made.

Whatever may be the authority for asserting that Clontarf Island was granted to Captain Cromwell, there’ is no doubt that it has belonged, as well as the remainder of the Clontarf estate, to the Vernon family since the days of Oliver.

John Vernon, the first possessor, was a younger son of an ancient and noble English family~ One of these Vernons had acquired by marriage the property of the family, of “Peveril of the Peak,” descended from William the Conqueror. It is probable that Glendinning’s marriage to the heiress of Avenel in Scott’s Abbot is founded on the circumstance of the marriage of a Vernon with the heiress of Avenel, by which Haddon in Derbyshire was acquired by the Vernons.

Sir George Vernon of Haddon in the sixteenth century was, on account of his great wealth, called “the King of the Peak.” His daughter Dorothy married Sir John Manners, ancestor of the Duke of Rutland. The romantic circumstances of this marriage are commemorated in Haddon Hall.

This historic Derbyshire estate of Haddon has received a memorial in the last few years in the newly-built Haddon Road adjoining Clontarf Castle. The first holder of the title of Lord Vernon, created in 1762, and still existing, was a great-grand-nephew of John Vernon, the first of the name in Clontarf Castle and Island. This John being, as has been said, a Cromwellian, was Quartermaster-General of the Army in Ireland.

His son and successor, Colonel Edward Vernon, who bore the same name and title as the present owner, is said, unlike his father, to have served the Stuarts. He was a Cavalier, who fought for Kings Charles the First and Second, both in England and Ireland.

In 1695 John Vernon, cousin of the Colonel, claimed the property from the, latter and succeeded. In John Vernon’s petition to the Irish Parliament he claims amongst other property, “the Islands.” The word is in the plural, as in the grant of 1608, evidently because the North Bull, then very small, and only about a century old in its present extent, (a portion of which was also a part of the Vernon estate, but now belongs to Lord Ardilaun), is practically an island but for the bridge and Bull Wall, which are of comparatively modern construction.

Some twenty years later there was much controversy and litigation between the Vernon family and the Corporation of Dublin concerning a tract of strand referred to by the Vernons as “the Pool and island of Clontarf.” The Corporation claimed that it was within their franchises and was their property. But Captain John Vernon in a speech made in 1731, which was printed by George Faulkner, stoutly asserted his right to the Island and reminded the Corporation that the liberties of the city on the north were bounded, according to their charter de libertatibus of the second of King John, “by the lands of Clonliffe, by the Tolka, and by the church of St. Mary, Oxmantown” (St. Mary’s Abbey).

Whatever may have been the rights of this controversy it will be noted that this Vernon claim that the Island was outside the city boundary was made after the reclamation of the North Lotts, when the Island lay, as it still does, a few yards from the City shore. Clontarf Island has been marked on the Ordnance Maps for many years past as within the City Parliamentary and Municipal boundary; as Clontarf mainland certainly is for the last eight or nine years. The Island was of use to the city in 1650 when it was made an isolation place for those afflicted with the plague which then raged in Dublin.

Eighteenth-century maps show “The Island as a ribbon-shaped piece of land with one end facing the Wharf, and “The Island House,” apparently a more ambitious structure than the little wooden house many may remember. The Island House is described in a book on Dublin, published nearly a century ago, as a place of recreation for the citizens, and the Island as a conspicuous object on a journey by land to Howth. Maps of the Protestant parish of Clontarf still include the Island as a part of the parish. The Ordnance Survey Maps of Dublin have never ceased to mark both the Island and the Bathing Pond. A Valuation Blue Book of sixty years ago mentions the “Bathing Island,” of which Mr. Vernon is returned as landlord and Mrs. Toole as tenant. Many may remember the Bathing Island Ferry Barge, plying from the Wharf, and the Bathing Pond, where swimming with corks was practised.

But the Island has disappeared. This is the result of the continuous removal of its sands for manure at low tide. There is a notice of the Port and Docks Board at several points on the Clontarf Road, dated 5th of April 1883, expressly prohibiting, under penalties, the removal of sand from “the Island of Clontarf.” But this prohibition would seem to have applied to those only who neglected to pay; for at high tide all that is now visible of the Island is the top of a few posts or stakes, the ruins of the last wooden house. At low tide the outline may still be made out, as it is distinguished from the surrounding bed of the sea by its stony surface, and still slightly greater elevation.

The Bathing Pond in the sands and the ruins of the slippery wooden causeway leading from the Ferry Barge’s landing-stage to the Island House may also be discerned when the tide is out. It is a pity that no effort should have been made to preserve this spot of Old Dublin, which has a history; the more so since it is probable that there is a natural accumulation of sand at this point, which would, if not removed, once more form this little Island and perpetuate a place as old as any part of Ireland, when the three or four miles of the adjoining district of Dublin were but newly recovered from the sea.

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