The Irish Penny Journal, Vol. 1 No. 49, June 5, 1841

Our metropolitan readers, at least, and many others besides, are aware of the magnificent but not easily to be realised project, recently propounded, of erecting a town on the east side of Malpas’s or Killiney Hill—a situation certainly of unrivalled beauty and grandeur. Plans, most satisfactory, and views prospective as well as perspective of this as yet non-existent Brighton or Clifton, have been laid before the public, with a view to obtain the necessary ways and means to give it a more substantial reality; but alas! for the uncertainty of human wishes! Queenstown, despite the popularity of our sovereign, is not likely, for some time at least, to present a rivalry, in any thing but its romantic and commanding site, to the busy, bustling, and not very symmetrically built town which has been erected in honour of Her august eldest uncle. The good people of Kingstown may therefore rejoice; their glory will not for some time at least be eclipsed; and the lovers of natural romantic scenery who have not money—they seldom have—to employ in promising speculations, may also rejoice, for the wild and precipitous cliffs of Killiney are likely to retain for some years longer a portion of their romantic beauty; the rocks will not be shaped into well-dressed forms of prim gentility; the purple heather and blossomy furze, “unprofitable gay,” may give nature’s brilliant colouring to the scenery, and the wild sea-birds may sport around: the time has not arrived when they will be destroyed or banished from their ancient haunt by the encroachment of man.
But however this may be, the first stone of the new town has been laid; nay, the first building—no less a building than “Victoria Castle”—has been actually erected; and, as a memorial of one of the gigantic projects of this speculating nineteenth century of ours, we have felt it incumbent on us to give its fair proportions a place in our immortal and universally read miscellany, in order to hand down its pristine form to posterity in ages when it shall have been shaped by time into a genuine antique ruin.