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4. Dublin-Wicklow Mountains
From Tamlacht Maelruain we now turn towards the Dublin-Wicklow mountains which cover some 50 square miles of granite based uplands fringed by schist and slate and dissected by spectacular ice and water sculpted glens. It is the sheer diversity of Dublin's hinterland which makes it such an attractive location for field studies. Our purpose in today's journey - for all field work is essentially a journey of exploration - is to describe and explain with reference to both physical and human geography the face of town and countryside.
The R113 which connects Tallaght to the hills passes through the townlands of Oldbawn, Oldcourt, Orlagh, Mountpelier and Killakee and joins the R115 from Rathfarnham which is the military road. These townlands originated as individual farms within the estate system of landownership. Oldbawn, for example, was in the hands of the Bulkeley family in the seventeenth century. They built a house here in 1635 which is reputed to have cost £3,000 and claimed they had changed Oldbawn from 'a rude, desolated and wild land to a delightful patrimony'. The house survived into the twentieth century and we have documentary evidence of the inhabitants of it and the associated village from the 1660s. The document gives a picture of a self-sufficient community with dairymaids, ploughboys, horseboys, brewers, lamb-boys and gameboys associated with the Big House and suggesting a diversified agricultural economy.
Most of the central townland houses have succumbed to the outward march of suburbia; some such as Allenton House survived into the 1980s when it was illegally demolished and all that now remains is a rather disconsolate tower. This ring of foothills looking down on the city is a kind of battleground between competing land uses. The original concept of a green belt between the mountains and the suburbs has been difficult to maintain as inexorable demands for housing renders the ambitious plans of the 60s redundant. It is the sheer cost as much one suspects than aesthetic considerations which prevents major developments upslope.
Tallaght has a mix of both privately built and public or local authority housing which in effect has produced communities or estates segregated on rather tenuous class grounds. There are numerous possibilities for fieldwork on the human geography of these areas. One could take the greater Tallaght district and establish land-use patterns and explain them with reference to developmental stages. It should be possible to select one major industry such as Jacob's Biscuits and discuss it as an example of relocation. One could then examine aspects of human geography through simple street based questionnaire surveys and address issues such as immigration, employment, recreational and shopping facilities, marital status and family size.
We are now entering what geographers term the urban-rural fringe, a world
which is neither city nor country. Agricultural practices are yielding
here to urban demands for golf-courses, graveyards and what are known
as landfill facilities which in plainer days were called dumps. Just west
of the mountain ridge was the Friarstown dump located upslope of
the Bohernabreena reservoir from the late 1960s. In the nineteenth
century this site was part of the ornamental or demesne ground of the
Shaw estate; it was subsequently quarried for its valuable glacial sand
deposits and it was the hole left by the quarrying which was filled by
the millions of tons of Dublin rubbish until the facility was closed within
the last few years. Such a location for a landfill site would be unthinkable
today which suggests an increasing awareness of environmental issues.
On the map St Colmcille's Holy Well and Orlagh House are marked and on this phase of the trip we will be examining the origins of such features and establishing contexts for them in greater Ireland. Fieldwork is as much about making these connections as itemising individual items. Holy wells were typically associated with churches in early Christian Ireland and were frequented on pattern days when their founding saint was commemorated. They may be survivals of pagan rituals involving water and suggest that the Christian church adapted and incorporated these into its culture. By the nineteenth century pattern days had become rather boisterous secular events and were banned by a puritan clergy. Orlagh House dates from the late eighteenth century and is typical of the type of rural villa which successful urban professional and commercial classes were building on the outskirts of towns in this period. The desire to achieve a kind of artificial rurality has had a profound influence on the settlement geography of Ireland and we can detect a continuum from the hunting lodges of gentry families and - stretching the links back into the iron age - the camps of the Fiannaiocht who chased the deer in Glenasmole to the holiday or second homes of modern times.
Orlagh House was first named Footmount to commemorate its owner
Lundy Foot and its present name Orlagh may be a play on the Irish
word Orlach (an inch). It was subsequently purchased by the Augustinians
and became a novitiate and a residence for their students who cycled from
here to the university in Earlsfort Terrace. Many such Big Houses, shorn
of their rent-paying lands by the Land Acts, were purchased by the newly
invigorated religious orders as schools and seminaries in a neat turnaround
of the wheels of history.
We have now joined the R115 and the road as the closely packed contours
rise sharply past the remains of Lord Massey's estate centre at
Killakee and the entrance to the Hellfire Club, two sites which
are familiar to many Dubliners. All of this landscape was carefully contrived
to take advantage of site and situation. The house of the planter - 'known
by the trees' in Austin Clarke's felicitous phrase - is no more here;
only the farmyard buildings now occupied by a restaurant and the beech
woodlands of the demesne remain to mark the site. As with Templeogue House
and Orlagh these were all part of a system which engulfed - some would
say enslaved Ireland - and created these very distinctive blocks symbolising
power and privilege. If the landlord planted beech the state in recent
times has planted sitka spruce with a vengeance and for the rest of our
trip we will have constant sight of this monospecies silviculture which
has dramatically altered the appearance of Ireland's marginal hill country
in the last fifty years.
Afforestation targets for the country have been set at 15 per cent and
the current forest cover stands at about eight per cent which will still
be below the general European average. Because county Wicklow has so much
marginal land it also has about a quarter of its area afforested but afforestation
has never been as contested a land policy here as in Leitrim, for example.
Wicklow's hill country has a long history of either state or estate ownership
and it is not as densely settled as the western marginal lands. Furthermore
there is a long tradition of silviculture in the county so that for many
it may be perceived as a 'natural' land cover.
