On Phoenix Park

‘IT’S THE LARGEST park in Europe!” I exclaimed with some pride as I ushered the husband through the gates of Phoenix Park for the first time, indicating with a sweep of my arm the unparalleled vastness of the greenery that stretched before us. He may have been momentarily impressed – he being from a land of superlatives himself – but a little research prompted a string of corrections to my expansive statement.

“Actually, it’s the largest enclosed park in a European capital city,” quoth he, finger on the text, eyebrows raised in a “fancy that” affectation known as smugness. True, those modifiers deflated my claims a little, but I would not be outdone. “Fine. But it’s the best thing about living in Stoneybatter.”

There was no arguing with that. Our own corner of the ’Batter is like a concrete mini-golf course. We tell the season by the make-up of the gutter detritus – ice-cream wrappers in summer, frozen dog poo in winter – at least, that’s how it would be if the Phoenix Park wasn’t a mere eight minutes from our front door.

So we go there a lot and, by the time we come back, the gutters are suddenly romantic and Wildean, and the concrete a shade less grey. That’s what a walk in the park can do. Depending on the time of year, it can bring the kind of pastoral pleasantries that sling you right back into childhood, to a time when snowdrops were a lot nearer eye level, and trees yielded treasures such as conkers and helicopter seeds, or piles of coloured leaves to swish and flop through. These days, spring is springing in the People’s Gardens, with yellow crocuses winking among the grasses and trees stretching out their heavy, leafy limbs in a kind of languorous reawakening.

Last November, when I ran through it in the early miles of the Dublin City marathon, the park was a thunder of pounding feet along its damp pathways, the last leaves falling underfoot in the stampede.

Through the winter, I crunched across the Dublin tundra, finding in its wide plains the breathtaking beauty of untouched snow. And now the snows are gone and something new is happening. Though April be the cruellest month, March is kind in the park. Even the husband, initially unimpressed by the trek along the wheezy North Circular to a park that couldn’t lay full claim to a proper superlative, has succumbed to its charms and constant discoveries, and considers it fair compensation for a tiny house with an L-shaped concrete demesne. There’s no shortage of space in the park, full of dark histories and current home to the President, the US ambassador and the Bornean orang-utan – the latter residing alongside all manner of squawking, steaming simians whose hoots, some mornings, carry all the way to the house.

With its swathes of space and high-profile residents, it’s a source of no small amazement that the park has survived the boom-time development frenzy at all, and somehow managed to retain all this prime real estate for general meandering. It turns out that we did manage to do this one thing right.

My morning runs take me up the long sweep of Chesterfield Avenue, past polo fields and the cricket grounds as far as the Phoenix monument. Then it’s a loop down the Kyber Road towards the magazine fort, a particularly pleasant digression because of its welcome downhillishness, but also because as the early mists rise off the low grasses, deer gather on the hills on either side and entertain lonely runners with displays of rutting bravado, antlers smacking in the still. At night, their eyes glitter in the beam of passing headlights.

While such treats are a helpful motivation to get me out of the house, my joys at such forays into the park are nothing compared to those experienced by Lola, my canine companion. The Phoenix Park is her Valhalla and her Mount Olympus, a veritable paradise on Earth – though also a smorgasbord of fetid edible piles of unknown quantities that she finds under the trees, of week-old bird carcasses and the remains of dropped ice-creams to be licked from the playground pavement.

Lola – for the most part a slothful and slumbering creature – transforms when she enters those gates, she will bound exuberantly through the wide spaces and lose herself among the trees with the wildness and waywardness of a dog half her age. Overcome with the sudden reminders of a natural world where her ancestors once roamed, she sheds the veneer of civilization as soon as she gets on the open plains by the papal cross, and spends her time tearing after invisible enemies and chasing down magpies, howling like a she-wolf under a full moon.

All of this, and Farmleigh’s market and cafe treats, tiny mazes and kiosks, and the shadowy surprises of the Furry Glen. I’m not sure many European urban capitals with large enclosed spaces can boast such treasures therein, and though I may be mildly partisan, I’d put the Phoenix up against any of the greats: Central, St James’s, or any Parisian garden.

It would be nice to close with a phoenix analogy – something about buds of spring rising from the ashes – but it turns out the name of this beloved park has its origins not from the mythical bird with its capacity for constant rebirth, but in the Irish words for clear water – “fionn uisce” – which admittedly sound like “phoenix” if you run ’em together quick enough.

Nothing to do with the mythical bird, then, which doesn’t take away from its mythical history: buried Vikings, murdered government officials, rent boys, papal worship and, year after year, marathon madness – the park’s seen it all and remains open for business. Which is spring business right now: you’d do well to make an appointment.