Holy wells were used to celebrate saints, seek cures and give thanks. There were some 3,000 wells across the country. The Irish Folklore Commission (IFC) collected oral information from people about holy wells in the 1930s, and completed a survey of holy wells in 1934. Geraldine Lynch has summarised the results of this survey for…
Category: Placenames
A road that never was?
One of my favourite maps I have come across is one drawn to mark out an alternative route from the village to Kilmalin avoiding the steep incline of Kilgarran Hill. I have drawn a representation of this map, and while it lacks the elegance of the original, it does indicate how much information it contains….
Taylor and Skinner Map of Ireland 1777
George Taylor and Andrew Skinner obtained funding to complete a map of Ireland and raised £2000 from Ireland’s landed gentry. They produced their map, surveyed in 1777 was a great aid to travellers, who would have had to previously rely on County maps. A portion of the page for the “Road from Dublin to Powerscourt…
Brassington & Gale Valuation of Powerscourt 1853: Tenant Names (Archive Month #18)
In 1853, during the minority of the 7th Viscount Powerscourt, the firm Brassington and Gale (Bachelor’s Walk) were requested to carry out a valuation of all property on the Estate, to assist the Guardians of the estate in deciding on rents that should be charged for land. They produced a ledger of incredible detail, which…
Killegar Church
“The cycling season is coming on,” wrote Rev. Professor George Thomas Stokes in 1891, “and cycling ought to be a great help to archæology.” And so he introduces his article on Killegar Church, which he says can be found by taking the road to Dundrum, and following “the high road to Stepaside…, riding through the…
Maps from Monck Papers at the National Library of Ireland (Archive Month #6)
The Monck papers which, like the previously mentioned Powerscourt papers, have their own index (No. 4 – Part I includes the Wicklow Estate information), have two maps of interest that I came across. Monck’s lived at Charleville, and the two maps mentioned here cover the area around Tinnehinch at the end of the 18th and…
House Book for Town of Enniskerry 1840 (Archive Month #2)
NAI 5.3573 30 Jan 1840: Houses in Town of Enniskerry Many of us are familiar with the wonderful Griffith Valuation records available online. The valuation of Ireland has a complicated heritage, but gathered pace as a result of the enactment of the Poor Law in Ireland in 1838, with a view to establishing a uniform…
Travellers’ Accounts of Touring in Enniskerry (Archive Month #1)
There’s a long tradition of travellers writing accounts of passing through Enniskerry and Tinnehinch, (usually) writing about the beauty of the area. In the early stages of the book, I used some of these accounts to build a picture of what the village was like in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. There are…
Hearth Money Rolls, Powerscourt, 1668
One of the earliest writings on placenames by the indefatigable Liam Price, historian, scholar and Wicklow judge, was his work on transcribing the Hearth Money Rolls of County Wicklow, which he published in 1931.* Price was a district justice in County Wicklow from the 1920s until the 1950s. His interest in history and antiquities apparently…
18th Century Surveys of Wicklow
One of the great sources of information I had in studying the village’s history was the range of parliamentary inquiries of the 19th century, with their detailed data collection and data analysis providing a great source of contemporary information. However, I confess to neglecting similar inquiries of the 18th century. A relatively recent publication by…
Enniskerry, 1910 Commercial interests mapped
Excerpt from Porter’s Directory for Enniskerry, 1910 Some notes and information on commercial interests according to Porter’s Directory, 1910 mapped on a Google map. Locations are approximate based on placename given. Green pins = farmer, red pin = local business, yellow pin = doctor, purple pin = accomodation. Click on a pin to see the…
Churchtown Graveyard, Powerscourt
A short video giving an overview of Churchtown Graveyard, near Powerscourt House. The shots were taken in August 2010.
The Depositions of 1641
The recent digitisation project of the 1641 depositions by Trinity College Dublin library allow text search of these documents. This allows us to probe these documents and find anything related to Enniskerry. According to the 1641 website, the depositions were recorded by the “Commission for the Despoiled Subject” and recorded testimonies from people who were…