I WONDER how many of you know a book called "The Stones of Bray" by Cannon Digby Scott, the father of Miss Jessie Scott of Knockdolian in Church Lane? He was rector of Bray and the book was published in 1913. He begins the geology and moves from there into archaeology and history. He begins with the stones of Bray Head - Cambrian rocks, staggeringly ancient compared with the short span of human history.
From Bray Head to the Murrough of Wicklow there stretches a dozen miles of low, soft easily eroded shore, broken only by this one outcrop of hard Cambrian rock on which this building stands, rising out of the sea and reaching a modest summit at the top of Jones's Hill. I am told that about 70 years ago in Bray there was an old man who used to talk about The Stones. So and so had been to The Stones [he would say but] he himself had not been to The Stones for a long time. If asked by a stranger "What Stones?" he would have replied "Why the grey stones, of course". The rocks jutting into the sea outside the new St David's school used to be marked on maps and charts as "The Grey Stones". There is no record of human habitation on this rock of ours till very late in history so I will begin by saying something about the surrounding district.

If you take the road from Redford to Little Sugar Loaf, where you reach the highest point, there is a T-junction. Just before this junction you can climb over a gate into a field on your left; cross two fields and you come to a place where four fields meet at a circular enclosure - a ditch of earth crowned by a hedge. This is the Rath of Cool na Skeagh and it is the most ancient trace of human settlement near Greystones. Rath - Bally and Kill are characteristic beginnings of Irish place names. A rath was a circular rampart of loose stones and earth crowned by a wooden paling, inside which a few families with their livestock would live in little thatched huts. All this was long before there were any towns. Canon Scott asks us to imagine the people of Cool na Skeagh looking down to the sea in 432 AD, and seeing a ship sailing northwards- Patrick's ship. He had landed on the Murrough at Wicklow and not been welcomed there so he was sailing northwards to make his next landing at an island off Skerries that we call Holmpatrick or Innispatrick-St Patrick's Island.

The inhabitants of this and other raths in the 5th century were Irish speaking, Iron Age pagans whose sons or grandsons became Christians in the next centuries when Ireland was to become famous as the Land of Saints and Scholars. Only faint ripples from the tides of history would reach this quiet backwater. Delgany - Deilgne Mochorogh - is mentioned occasionally in the annals of the 7th and 8th centuries. The Danes began their raids; they founded Dublin in 841 and its satellite Dalkey and Wicklow very soon afterwards. Some men from Cool na Skeagh may have fought with their fellow Leinstermen as allies of the Danes of Dublin against Brian Boru at Clontarf in 1014. There was another rath whose name is familiar to us. Less than half way up the main road from Redford to Windgates there is a turn to the right. This is Ennis's lane running down to a level crossing on the railway and so literally into the sea. Just beside the level crossing there used to be a lime kiln and the remains of an ancient Church. Here was Rathdown: all traces of the rath itself have disappeared. Rathdown was the centre of the Barony of Rathdown - the North Eastern corner of Co. Wicklow and the South Eastern corner of Co. Dublin. The Chieftain who lived in Rathdown was lord of all that territory long before Baronies and Counties were invented by the \Normans. The rath is described in a note to the first Ordnance Survey map in 1837.

The first Normans arrived in 1169 followed in 1171 by Henry II of England who was recognised as Lord of Ireland. The Normans built a fine new wooden castle on a great artificial mound of earth and called the place New Castle. The mount of earth is still there 800 years later, crowned by a later stone castle. The Normans began to divide Ireland into Counties but there was no County of Wicklow until after 1600. The O'Tooles, the O'Byrnes and further south, the Kavanaghs held Wicklow and defied the sheriffs of Dublin, Kildare, Carlow and Wexford. Until the end of the middle ages, Greystones was quite literally "Beyond the Pale". Then in 1536, Henry VIII's Government pushed the pale south of Bray and established a family called Talbot in the lands and castle of Rathdown. It was about this time that another Castle or rather stone Manor House was built, perhaps in the reign of Queen Elizabeth - the original Killincarrig House or Killincarrig Castle. It is the oldest building within the parish of Greystones and is well worth a visit. Go down the road running east from the Cherry Orchard and you will see this large ivy covered ruin standing in the back garden of a semi-detached house on your left. The owner courteously allowed me to go through and have a look, though he might not be pleased if the whole Greystones literary society asked him one after another. It has been roofless for at least 200 years. It was a solid stone house of two stories with lofty ceilings and a third semi attic; about 25 feet by 50 feet at ground level, with an east wing whose area might be 15 feet squared. You can see the great chimney in the thickness of the west wall and the remains of a stone staircase in a side turret. It is not known who was the builder of this "Castle" but circa 1600 the first Protestant settlers from England arrived in the district. Delgany Parish records begin in the reign of James I and from the very beginning the surnames Massey and Fox are to found. The house beside the Cherry Orchard, the Stanley's house, may go back into the 17th century; it used to belong to a branch of the Buckley family. The big tree outside the Cherry Orchard is about as old as the house. A photograph taken in 1906 shows a shop front on the side of the house nearest the road, but an ordinary window replaced that by 1922. It was in the 17th century under James I that Wicklow became a county, sending two members to Parliament in Dublin.

Then came the Confederation of 1641. The Confederate Catholics of Ireland under Owen Roe O'Neill drove out the Protestants from most of the country, and from their capital in Kilkenny negotiated with King Charles I whom they supported against the English Parliament and Puritans with the Pope - there is a portrait of Finoccini in the papal legate to The Confederacy in the Common Room of St Kieran's College, Kilkenny. A small outpost of the Confederate Army held Killincarrig House. Cromwell overthrew the Confederation. He is said to have spent a night at Killincarrig House in 1649 on his march from Drogheda to Wexford. The north wall of the east wing is missing; did he bombard it, or blow it up perhaps after using it for a night's rest to deny it to his enemies? The Cromwellian Plantation - the great influx of Protestant farmers and landlords from which most southern Protestant families can trace their descent, followed Cromwell's victory. County Wicklow received a larger proportion of this new element into its population that districts further west and south - Hepenstall and Buckley, Evans, Sutton, Holts, Cox reinforced the Massey and Fox families.

Down Survey

With the Protestants came the English Language. It is said that Three Trout's Bridge - the bridge beside Farrenkelly on the Kilcoole road - is a corruption of Tri Droichid - the Irish for three bridges. The bridge has given its name to the river, not the other way. The name The Grey Stones was probably given by the English-speaking sailors to this dangerous landmark on the coast. Blacklion sounds like an inn sign but Killincarrig-Clein na Carraig-the little wood on the rock is original Irish. Possibly the name refers to the rocky knoll crowned with trees just above Bellevue Heights. Cromwell ordered a survey to be made-the Down Survey; nothing to do with Rathdown or County Down, simply because the information was put down on paper. From this survey the subdivision of Counties into baronies, parishes and town lands takes shape. The three town lands we are particularly concerned with are Rathdown Upper, Rathdown Lower, and Killincarrig, all in the Parish of Delgany, Barony of Rathdown, County of Wicklow. The surveyor was Sir William Petty, and on his way he marked both Rathdown Castle and Killincarrick House by a little drawing of each; it was before the days of conventional signs.

La Touche and Hawkins Whitshed

1690. The Battle of the Boyne followed by the Penal laws and the century of Protestant Ascendancy. For over a hundred years there was no pitched battle fought on Irish soil. The characteristic building of this period is not a monastery or a castle but the large unfortified dwelling house with its well-proportioned rows of sashed windows. There is only one example of this period in Greystones - Killincarrick House in the wood at the top of Whitshed road, two fields away from the ruins of the first Killincarrick house. The family who built and lived in this house were called Hawkins and they owned the townland of Killincarrick and other lands further south. The boundary of the townland runs from the sea at the station, up the lane behind Killincarrig road, along the North edge of the golf course to the Bray-Kilcoole road, through Killincarrig village to Three Trout's Bridge, then down the river to the sea at Cobblers Bulk. The two town lands of Upper and Lower Rathdown were bought early in the 18th century by the La Touche family. They belonged to that small but important element in the Irish population - the Huguenots - French Protestant refugees from the persecuting Louis XIV, who treated his Protestant subjects with the same intolerance that the then Irish Protestant Parliament was showing against their Roman Catholic fellow countrymen. The La Touches let Rathdown Castle fall into ruins and built their big house with its French name, Bellevue, high on the south west of Kendlestown hill, their estate extended as far inland as the Glen of the Downs.

But still we have not come to the Greystones we know. Topographica Hibernica of 1795 mentions it as "a noted fishing village four miles beyond Bray; the herrings first brought into Dublin are usually taken by the fishing boats of this place". This guidebook also mentions coastguards - "a preventive water guard stationed at Blacklion". The presence of Preventive offices is explained by the existence of a vigorous smuggling trade. Fishing is not the only thing you can do with a boat. There was on Bray head a large well-concealed smugglers cave called "The Brandy Hole". It was destroyed when the railway was built.

It is often assumed that in eighteenth century Ireland, because nearly all the landlords were Protestant, all the Protestants we landlords. Even the eminent historian G.M. Trevelyan makes this elementary mistake. While the La Touches and Hawkins were living in the big houses of Bellevue and Killincarrick, the ordinary Foxes and Masseys, Evans, Buckleys, Jones, Jolts and Coxes were working as farmers, fishermen and tradesmen, bringing their children to be christened in the Old Church behind the Delgany Inn and later in Peter La Touches handsome New Delgany Church. The century ended with '98. In Antrim and Down it was an armed uprising to establish democracy on the model of revolutionary France, in Wicklow and Wexford it had more of the character of a sectarian civil war. Wicklow suffered its share of cruel deeds, of fear, hatred and anger, but not so terribly as Wexford.

The most famous Wicklow figure was Michael Dwyer who held out as an outlaw in Glenmalure and the Glen of Imaal for several years. Another Wicklow leader was Mathew Holt, a Protestant rebel who was saved from execution by the intervention of Mrs La Touche. There was a family called Holt living in Killincarrig thirty years ago. A great many of the rank and file insurgents, when they surrendered, were found to be carrying copies of patriotic songs in English in their pockets. Wicklow people by the end of the 18th century not only spoke English but also often could read and write English as well.

French threats

The new century began with the way against Napoleon:

O Bovey's on the say
Says the Sean/Bhean Bhocht*
And the Orange will decay
Says the Sean/Bhean Bhocht.
O Boney's on the shore
Says the Sean/Bhean Bhocht
We'll be the Orange men no more
Says the Sean/Bhean Bhocht.

(*phonetic Shan Van Voct)

To protect the coasts of Ireland from French Invasion, the first Lord of the Admiralty, Lord St Vincent appointed a certain Admiral Whitshed to organise the defences of Dublin Bay. Admiral Whitshed is said to have planned the building of the Martello Towers from Portmarnock to Bray, the most famous being Joyce's Tower at Sandycove. The admiral married a daughter of the Hawkins family. She had no brothers and sisters; she was the heiress; so eventually their son Captain Sir St Vincent Bentink Hawkins succeeded to the property and after retiring from the navy lived at Killincarrig house.

Survey

For the year 1838 we have a most important historical document - the first Ordnance survey map. It shows a scatter of less than a dozen houses on the south side of the harbour and a road, the present Rathdown road, connecting them with Blacklion. One of the houses is marked 'School' but there is no church and nothing but empty fields once you leave the neighbourhood of the harbour, nothing like a village street; there is not even a man-made harbour, just rocks jutting into the sea where the pier now begins, offering some shelter from all but North Easterly winds. The dozen houses are named Greystones and the point of rock just north of the men's bathing place is named 'The Grey Stones'. A dozen years later, Greystones was still a notable fishing centre with 36 yawls - sailing boats 35 feet long, manned by five men, and registered. It seems that a lot of the fishermen lived away from the harbour in Blacklion and Killincarrig. The coast guards were now living in the nearer harbour village - the row of old one-story houses known as Kenmare terrace was their quarters and Trafalgar Lodge the residence of the commander. The fishing industry must have been important in mitigating the effects of The Great Hunger of 1847-48, though it is recorded that the Arklow fishermen were reduced to such straits that they pawned their boats and gear. Relief money given by the Society of Friends was used to redeem them-Christian aid.

The Railway

Now we come to the most significant year in the history of Greystones-1855-the year in which the Dublin and Wicklow railway was completed. (Trains had already started running between Harcourt Road and Bray in 1854. Harcourt Road, the firs terminus was on the south bank of the canal near Dartmouth road, the bridge across the canal and the Harcourt Street Terminus came in 1859.) In March 1855 plans were submitted for the proposed station at Greystones (but it was to be called Delgany station). A firm called Messrs. Crowe and Sons secured the contract for Delgany and Wicklow stations for three thousand pounds. On 13th October a train made a trial run from Bray to Wicklow, the passengers included the railway contractor William Dargan who built Quinsboro' Road, Esplanade at Bray, and the Mount Anville at Dundrum where he lived and whose statue stands outside the National Gallery in Dublin of which he was one of the founders.

The engineer who planned the line around Bray Head was the famous Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the engineer of the Great Western Railway. On the 30th October the line was ceremoniously opened with the running of a special train from Harcourt road at 11.30 am, conveying The Lord Lieutenant and other dignitaries. The Freeman's Journal recorded it:

The special train reached Bray in half an hour precisely, and after a stay of 12 minutes set off upon the run round the Head which was at first doubtless one of considerable anxiety to many of its inmates. Those who had not previously visited the spot had been taught to look upon this portion of the line as a bluff rocky promontory in which each step was fraught with greater peril than the last, while those who had an opportunity of seeing the works from a higher level even within a comparatively recent period, were still more impressed with the difficulties and dangers of the route. The train was stopped at each of the points of superior interest and the excursionists were afforded the fullest opportunity of examining and admiring the details of this stupendous undertaking. The first of these was at a point known as Ram Scalp opposite Branstone tunnel at which point it has been found necessary to construct a wooden bridge 300 feet long at 75 feet altitude supported on buttresses of solid masonry. After running through various passes cleft in the solid rock a third tunnel is arrived at, one eight of a mile long, cut through apportion of the mountain known as Cable Rock.

This day, 30th October 1855, marks the beginning of Greystones, as we know it. Immediately people began to arrive by train to spend a day, a month or the prolonged leisure of retirement by the sea. Bayswater Terrace at the Harbour belongs to this early period. Village Reshaped Two roads were built to connect the hamlet of Greystones with Delgany Station, we now know them as Church Road and Trafalgar Road but as yet there was no Church. The road from the harbour crossed the bridge and then met the other road at an acute angle, (where a house called Mountain View stands now). That is why Mountain View does not directly face the road. Look at the house behind the thrift shop, what you see is the back of the house, its front windows looked out on the original road. It was built as a school and later was the teacher's house when a new school was built where the Thrift Shop is now. Look at Moran's fish shop beside Ally Evan's, these all mark the course of the original road. The station buildings were naturally on the Delgany side of the line and from them a road ran diagonally across the Whitshed property towards Delgany.

The Churches

Greystones was still just a corner of Delgany Parish in the Church of Ireland, and of Bray parish in the Roman Catholic Church. However, within two years a small Church of Ireland church was built by private subscription. It was an un-endowed unofficial chapel of Ease to the Parish Church. At this time the Church of Ireland was still the Established Church of the country and the rector of Delgany was supported by tithes paid by the La Touche and Whitshed families; the clergyman in charge of Greystones would have at first been paid by voluntary subscriptions. The founders of the Church must have been happy to see it enlarge three times in 1875, 1888 and 1898, but the parish never added a church tower. The families could not have foreseen that the Parish of Greystones would become the most populous Church of Ireland parish in the whole diocese of Glendalough. As a small boy I was taken to the Harvest Festival in Greystones in 1920 and at that service there may well have been some old people who were present at the first services in the Church.

In the 1850's, the famous novelist Anthony Trollope was head of the Irish post office. He was the inventor of the Pillar-box. The pillar-box outside the Ormonde Cinema bears the initials V-R, Victoria Regina and is of the original pattern with a knob on the top. Another example of this pattern stands opposite Bray Town Hall. I think I am right in saying that until recently the Greystones pillar-box stood at the harbour; and it may have been put there by Trollope's orders. Greystones began at the harbour and spread southwards. I have heard it said that Upton at the corner beside the flagpole was the original post office.

In 1864 the Church was raised to the status of a Parish Church and consecrated by Archbishop Trench. Perhaps it was then that it was dedicated to St Patrick. The three town lands of Upper Rathdown, Lower Rathdown and Killincarrig became the parish of Greystones St Kilian's Church in Blacklion was built in 1866 and a Roman Catholic Parish of Greystones and Blacklion were formed independent of Bray. St Kilian was one of the early Irish missionaries to the continent - there is a statue of him at Bonn.

Charles Dickens had just written Our Mutual Friend, his last complete novel, he was to start one more but did not finish it before his death in 1970. Alexandra College was founded in 1866 and 1867 was the year of the Fenian rising. W.B. Yeats was born in 1865. James Connolly in 1866. It was not only from Dublin that visitors came. The railway had changed its title to the Dublin, Wicklow, Wexford Railway Company and had reached Enniscorthy in 1863. My grandmother remembered coming up from Enniscorthy to spend a family holiday at Bayswater Terrace sometime around 1870. The expedition would have had the same adventurousness as going to Majorca or the Canary islands today. About the same time a branch line reached Shillelagh. Liscarrig, (the house is no longer standing) beside St Patrick's Hall, was built by a County Kilkenny family who travelled by horse drawn vehicle to Shillelagh and on by rail to Greystones.

Train Smash on Bray Head

On 8th August 1867, occurred the Brandy Hole Accident. Listen to the Freeman's Journal:

When I arrived here (Bray) this morning nothing could exceed the consternation which was caused by the terrible intelligence which was received that the up train from Enniscorthy had run over one of the fatal chasms of Bray head and that all the passengers had been killed and the carriages dashed to atoms. Telegrams announcing the accident were sent to town and Messrs Waldron Maunsell and Payne the engineers and workman proceeded by special train for the scene of the calamity which is known as Ram Scalp's bridge crossing the chasm through which the mountain torrents flow into the sea at what is known as the Brandy Hole because it was a favourite resort for smugglers running contraband. I cannot convey the slightest idea of the terrible sight that met my eyes. Beneath me at a distance of 40 feet was to be seen the engine and tender turned bottom up bulged and broken as if they had been made of tin. The platform of a third class carriage stood in a semi upright position sustaining the second-class carriage, which partially overhung the precipice.

In fact only two passengers were killed but twenty-three with the driver and fireman were injured. The derailment was caused by a faulty joint between two rails on the bridge spanning Ram Scalp. An artist's impression of the accident appeared in the Illustrated London News.

Elizabeth Hawkins Whitshed

The bridegroom the Lord Chancellor approved for Elizabeth Whitshed was a colourful character called Colonel Fred Burnaby of the 2nd Dragoon Guards (the Blues). (I think that is the regiment that James in Upstairs and Downstairs belonged to. They were married on 25th June 1879 nearly a hundred years ago, just about when Iolanthe was first produced in 1882. I wonder did they go to see it together? Her cousin Archer Bentinck, who later became Duke of Portland, gave her away. Sir St Vincent Whitshed had built a new house beside the sea, the third Killincarrick House. We call it the Woodlands Hotel [today] but the Ordnance Survey maps show it as Killincarrick House. It was larger and more modern than the old house with plat glass windows instead of the Georgian patterned ones with their smaller panes, and it soon had one of the new tennis lawns. Lawn tennis began in 1878. Captain Burnaby is described as a celebrity, politician, balloonist and traveller. One of his exploits was to ride out into the mysterious deserts beyond the Caspian Sea to a place called Khiva, an exploit whose name is preserved by the oldest house in the Burnaby. He was killed in 1885 at Ombdurman in the Sudan on the expedition, which reached Khartoum too late to save the life of General Gordon. Poor Elizabeth was left a widow at the age of 24. They had one son, Harry St Vincent Augusts Burnaby who was born in Killincarrig House but for Health reasons both mother and son left Ireland and settled in California.

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