“There is not a single one of its acres that has not been stained with blood over and over again, in those gray mornings of the eighteenth century, when Dublin beaux, half-sobered after a night’s debauch, used to confront one another in the dew-drenched grass, and startle the huddled herds of deer with the deadly crack of pistols at twelve paces.”
Beyond Phœnix Park is Lucan, four miles up the Liffey, near the river’s celebrated salmon-leap.
Clondalkin, six miles from Dublin, possesses one of the finest and most perfect round towers in Ireland, eighty feet in height, and forty-five in circumference at the base.
The Falls of the Liffey, at Poula-Phooka, twenty miles from town, flow under a graceful viaduct. Here the foam-whitened river casts itself down a succession of rocky leaps, and through a richly wooded gorge, into the smoother plain below. This is a scenic gem, such as amateur photographers love, and its picturings are found in the album of almost every Irish traveller. Its name enshrines one of the best known of the many Celtic fairy myths,—that of the Phooka. Certainly, the wild, lofty defile of splintered rock, through which the fall leaps down, must have been exactly the sort of place to allure the goblin horse that had such an unpleasant fancy for breaking people’s necks.
The legend of the Phooka is one familiar in many forms to all lovers of folk-lore. It is claimed to be of Celtic origin, but with equal assurance it is said to be Norse, and again Indian. The apparition is a weird ghost-like horse-shape, not unlike the steed which Ichabod Crane saw mounted by a headless horseman.
Kingstown, seven miles from Dublin, has no great interest for the lover of artistic or historic shrines, though the view of its harbour, with its cross-channel shipping, its fishing-boats, and its long, jutting piers, composes itself gaily enough, on a bright summer’s day, into a pleasing picture.
Originally named Dunleary, the town received its present title in 1821, after the departure of George IV. An obelisk, surmounted by a crown, and placed upon four stone balls, stands near the harbour entrance, and commemorates—what? The king’s coming? Not at all. He landed at Howth, and no one, apparently, thought that incident worthy of a memorial. The Kingstown obelisk commemorates his departure from his Irish dominions.
This seems significant, but it will not do to condemn Irish hospitality on this score. Perhaps it is an attempt at humour. If so, it is not wholly unsuccessful.
Just north of Dublin are two spots famed alike of history and legend,—at least most of the local story-tellers’ tales sound like legends,—Clontarf and Howth.
As the Hill of Howth is one of the first of Ireland’s landmarks which come to the vision of the majority of visitors from England, it may perhaps be permissible to include the following lines here. They were written many years ago by a local poet whose, name is lost in obscurity, but whose verse is sufficiently apropos to-day to need no qualifying comment: