The Parish of Ward

The Parish of Ward

The parish of Ward is stated in the seventeenth century to have contained the townlands of Gallanstown, Irishtown, Phepockstown, Spricklestown, and Ward.

It contains now the townlands of Cherryhound, Irishtown, Killamonan, Newpark, Spricklestown, and Ward, Lower and Upper. **

The Ward and its Vicinity**

The parish of Ward lies to the north-east of the parish of Mulhuddart, and is bounded to the south-east by the parish of Finglas. Its village, which is situated on one of the chief highways to the north of Ireland, is distant about six miles from Dublin, and is a favourite meeting-place of the staghunt, to which it has given name.

After the Anglo-Norman settlement the lands of la Garde, or the Ward, appear as a possession of the family of le Bank, to whom in the person of Nicholas le Bank extensive property in Ireland was granted by Henry the Second.

In the first half of the thirteenth century a right of turbary in his “tenement near Finglas” was conveyed by Sir Raymond le Bank to his neighbours the canons of All Saints for the salvation of himself, his wife Alice le Bret, and his other relations, and in the second half of that century a division was made between the manor of Finglas and the manor of the Ward, under the direction of Raymond le Bank, by means of a great trench, which was afterwards known as the halfpenny trench.

As legal proceedings a hundred years later show, the division between the manors was a subject of contention between the Archbishop of Dublin, as lord of the manor of Finglas, and Raymond le Bank, and a large moor and wood were found to have been withheld without title by the representatives of Raymond from the archbishop.

The last Raymond le Bank had two daughters, Mabel and Joan. In 1285, when Mabel is said to have been the widow of Roger de Mesinton, Joan was unmarried; but she appears subsequently as the wife of Geoffrey Travers, a member of a family then prominent in the northern part of Fingal. Her husband is mentioned in 1803 as paying the composition for the royal service in respect of the Ward; and in 1314, when he is styled knight, he confirmed to the Priory of Al Saints a grant of land in “the tenement of Castleknock,” which had been made to the priory by his sister-in-law.

Later in the fourteenth century his cousin and heir John, son of Geoffrey Travers, was in possession of the manor; and in the fifteenth century two heiresses, Alice Travers, who married William Cheevers, and Blanche Travers, who married Stephen Tynbegh, had succeeded to it. Afterwards one moiety became vested through the Berminghams in the Barons of Howth, and the other moiety in the family of Delahide.

During the first half of the sixteenth century the castle, round which the village sprang up, was occupied by Richard Delahide, who filled for twenty years a seat on the Irish judicial bench. At the time of the rebellion of Silken Thomas he was chief justice of the common pleas, and was superseded on suspicion of being in sympathy with the conspirators; but he was subsequently reinstated on the bench as chief baron of the exchequer.

After his death, which occurred prior to the year 1542, his son George Delahide and his wife Janet Plunkett are mentioned in connexion with the lands of the Ward; but the castle came then into the possession of the barons of Howth. As mentioned in the history of Howth, it was the residence, prior to their succession to the Howth title, of Richard Lord Howth and his brother the blind lord.

At the Ward, as well as at Howth and Raheny, the blind lord indulged his passion for building, and placed on the castle a tablet, similar to those erected by him at Howth and Raheny, bearing the date 1576, and the arms of St. Lawrence and Plunkett, with the letters C and B, the initials of his own and his wife’s Christian names.

Towards the close of the sixteenth century the castle, which was numbered amongst the principal castles of the county, was occupied by Walter Segrave, a Dublin merchant, to whom there will be further reference under the parish of Finglas; and when the seventeenth century opened it provided a residence for the blind lord’s grandson, Sir Christopher St. Lawrence. But owing to his military avocations, and separation from his wife, he had not long occasion to use it, and before the year 1606 it had become the home of Thomas White, a citizen of Dublin identified with the parish of St. Audoen.

Not long after Sir Christopher St. Lawrence’s succession to the Howth title, in 1614, Thomas White purchased from him for eight hundred pounds a fee-farm interest in the manor and castle subject to a rent of forty pounds; and after Thomas White’s death, in 1626, this interest passed to his son James White.

But ten years later James White sold it to Sir James Ware, who will be further mentioned in connexion with the adjacent parish of Santry, for two thousand one hundred and fifty pounds. The premises were then described as a castle, thirty messuages and gardens, a pigeon-house, six orchards, five hundred and sixty acres of land, a hundred acres of wood and underwood, ten acres of bog, twenty acres of furze, three acres under water, and a water-course.

Thomas White and his family appear as patients of the great Irish physician of that time, Dr. Thomas Arthur, who records in his fee-book visits to the Ward, but James White was not on good terms with him. In his will, which was made in 1662, he mentions that Dr. Arthur held him responsible for goods which he had left in his care “during the troubles.” He says that they had been taken by soldiers, excepting a pan weighing forty-two pounds, which his children had sold “in their want” for twenty-one shillings, and he left forty shillings to Dr. Arthur in settlement of his claim, “declaring before God that he knew not to the value of sixpence of the rest of his goods.”

As well as the castle of Ward there was one on the lands of Spricklestown, which belonged to the family of FitzRery of Coolatrath in Kilsallaghan parish. At the beginning of the seventeenth century this castle was occupied by a cadet of the house of Luttrellstown, Richard Luttrell, who was married to a daughter of Richard FitzRery of Coolatrath, and thence, as a funeral entry records, after his death in 1619, his body was carried to Clonsilla to be interred.

During the rebellion some of the Irish forces were stationed at the Ward, and the parish was so devastated that when the Commonwealth was established there were found but the walls of the castles of Ward and Spricklestown and of the church. The habitable dwellings at the Ward comprised only eight cottages, near which an orchard, garden, and grove of trees with some offices, remained to indicate the former importance of the site, and the only dwelling in the parish larger than a cottage was a thatched house with a brick chimney on the lands of Phepockstown.

At the time of the Restoration the inhabitants of the parish numbered eight persons of English and eighty-five of Irish descent, and seven years later there were two houses in the village with two hearths each, occupied by Lawrence Purfield and William Rose.

During the early years of the eighteenth century New Park, which contained the lands of Phepockstown, dominated the vicinity of the Ward, as the residence of the Right Honourable Robert Rochfort, sometime attorney-general and speaker of the house of commons, and afterwards chief baron of the exchequer.

At the time of the rebellion the lands of Phepockstown were the property of John Delahide of Powerstown, and subsequently became part of James the Second’s estate in Ireland. As such they were sold in 1703 at Chichester House, and they were then purchased by Robert Rochfort.

In his day Rochfort enjoyed a great reputation as a profound lawyer, which was probably not less from his habit of dilating on affairs of state at home and abroad; but he was chiefly remarkable, then, as he is to-day, for the great wealth which he acquired. Indeed, so much was his attention directed to its acquisition that it was generally supposed he was ambitious of a peerage rather than a seat on the bench, but to the “end “old Lombard Street,” as Swift called him, remained intent on amassing money, and left the obtainment of a peerage to his descendant the first Earl of Belvidere.

In Swift’s references to him Rochfort figures as an uncompromising Tory, but he had started his political career as a Whig, and certainly his sentiments were very far removed from Jacobitism. When able to leave Dublin Rochfort stayed principally at his Westmeath seat, Gaulstown, and New Park saw but little of him

New Park! by nature a delightful seat,

By art improved, and the designed retreat

Of a rich family, both good and great;

Who, if they oftener but retired there,

Would make that pleasant place the better fare;

Meat would the kitchen fill, the cellar wine,

The parlour with bright sideboard daily shine;

The house with cheerful, honest friends abound;

And all with pleasure, mirth, and joy be crowned.

But afterwards New Park became “the six-mile-off country seat” of the chief baron’s second son, John Rochfort, whom Swift pictures as a mighty hunter, and always calls Nim. But John Rochfort had his studious side, and on coming of age obtained a seat in parliament, which, in spite of his father’s proverbial Toryism, he retained under the Hanoverian dynasty.

He was a much-privileged member of the Deanery circle, where his intimacy was evidenced by his appointment as one of Stella’s executors ; and it is said by Swift that there were few accomplishments that he did not possess.

But later allusions to Nim indicate that his father’s love of money had been inherited by him, and Swift found that “the damned vice of avarice” was an alloy in the character of an otherwise agreeable man. At that time, however, Swift viewed everyone in the worst light, and he had certainly no reason to complain of Nim, who stood by him to the last, and was moved by true friendship to act on the commission “do lunatico inquirendo” when other intimates at the Deanery deserted Swift.

In John Rochfort’s time it is said that the lands of the Ward, amounting to over five hundred acres, were let to a tenant who failed to make a livelihood out of them at four shillings and sixpence an acre, but that on the lands being divided and manured with marle, they became worth sixteen shillings an acre, and produced the finest corn.

About the middle of the eighteenth century New Park was the residence of Mr. George Garnett, and Spricklestown of Mr. James Hamilton, who has been mentioned already as father of the builder of Abbotstown, and member of parliament during the reign of George the Second for the borough of Carlow.

Towards the close of that century Austin Cooper visited the village, and records that it bore the appearance of having been designed as a farm-yard. Granaries and stables with a pigeon-house, which he describes as handsome, were the prominent objects in the midst of walled enclosures and orchards; but on closer examination he found in the gate-piers and remains of the castle traces of the place “having been genteelly inhabited.”

The castle consisted then of the vaulted basement, which was thirty-one feet long, twenty-three feet wide, and twelve feet high. In it there were a window and two doors; one of the latter, Gothic in shape, led into the orchard, where there was another vaulted chamber covered with grass and some fragments of walls. Some years later Austin Cooper’s attention was drawn to Spricklestown, and there he found also the vaulted basement of a castle which presented “a very ancient appearance.” **

Ecclesiastical History.**

Beyond a very small portion of the gable no remains of the chapel of Ward, which was dedicated to St. Brigid, have for a century been visible. Its origin, like that of the other churches in the vicinity, is unknown. It appears first as a possession of the chancellor of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in right of his rectory of Finglas.

At the time of the dissolution of the cathedral in the sixteenth century it was in use, and the tenants of the tithes were bound to provide a fit chaplain. But it was in ruins in the time of John Rochfort, who made a new entrance “with two neat piers of stone and brick,” and planted the churchyard with two rows of elms.

At the time of Austin Cooper’s visit these elms were very tall and overshadowed the ruins, which Austin Cooper was deterred from inspecting by some ladies being within them.

To Chapter 5. To Ball Index. Home.