Park Life - on war and peace in Dublin’s greatest green space

Following my failure to locate the exact viewpoint of William Ashford's panorama of 1790s Dublin (Diary, March 17th), I have been set another puzzle by reader Dennis Kennedy, formerly of this parish. It too is a landscape, also painted from the Phoenix Park, by the little-known English artist JH Hamilton-Marr (1846–1913).

The picture is precisely dated: July 14th, 1870. The vista is harder to pinpoint, because although the Sugar Loaf is identifiable in the distance, the artist has taken the liberty of moving another Wicklow (or Dublin) mountain several kilometres nearer to the city. Speaking of Liberties, it seems to have landed on them, or just beyond, around Harold's Cross.

Impressionistic though the watercolour is, the foreground clearly depicts military manoeuvres in a large flat space that can only be the park's "Fifteen Acres".  The redcoats were hardly celebrating Bastille Day (although we might note in passing that the Franco-Prussian war would break out later that same week).

Motte

But whatever they were doing, the painting’s other mysterious feature is the large, flat-topped mound behind them. It looks like a “motte”, suggests Kennedy: “Was there, or is there, anything like that in the park?”

Put a head on that: Croke Park headers and ageing stout

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Lie of the landscape? Frank McNally on trying to put himself in the picture

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Forbidding Fruit – Frank McNally on two great but lesser-known Irish exports: St Piran and the Cockagee apple

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Word Up – Frank McNally with a further (but not farther) reading from the Stylebook of Leviticus

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Well, having run up and down the many hills around it often enough, I can say with confidence that no, there is nothing quite like that in the Fifteen Acres now. Also in most of my old Dublin maps, all but the city-side corner of the park tends to be omitted.

But in one map, from 1816, I found a truncated inscription on an equally truncated Fifteen Acres that may help. It includes the words “Practice Ground” and “Butt”. And in this context, I suspect the latter term means “a mound for shooting practice”.

Such mounds are typically smaller than the one depicted. But I pause again here to caution readers against searching for the term "giant butt", or anything similar, on Google. Thanks to our American friends, even "giant butt in Phoenix Park" may get you redirected, with unintended consequences, to a city in Arizona.

Back on safer ground, however, I find writer Sheridan Le Fanu referring in 1863 to an “artillery butt” in the Fifteen Acres. And in 1882, this newspaper’s archive describes large-scale military manoeuvres there, “in rere of the butts” (another phrase you probably shouldn’t Google).

Also featured on the 1816 map, by the way, is the “Star Fort”, an eight-point walled enclosure at least 10 times the size of the Magazine Fort nearby.  It was known as Wharton’s Folly, after the British viceroy who built it in 1709. Apparently he planned to retreat there if the city rose against his rule.

In general, the Phoenix Park was a much more militarised place in centuries past. But if the swords have been transformed into ploughshares, the fortresses have mostly become playing fields. The Star Fort has long disappeared under the park’s cricket and Gaelic games pitches, while the shooting butts have also made way for goalposts.

Walkers, runners, and cyclists have meanwhile colonised the hills, including the "Khyber Road", named in days of empire for a fanciful resemblance to the tribal uplands of British India. The only tribes you meet there now are sports clubs, and even those are more peaceful than formerly.

Commenting on the park’s vastness in relation to the city it serves, a writer in this newspaper once suggested it was “perhaps necessary to such a contrary nation”, because it meant that “cricket, polo, hurling, football and Sinn Féin rallies” could be held simultaneously inside its boundaries, without the protagonists ever meeting.

Park run

There has been no organised sport in the park in recent months, of course, but in a time of pandemic, as I was reminded this week, the vastness may be more important than ever.

Around teatime on St Patrick’s Day, I went for my usual run there, as a beautiful sunset bathed the place in golden light. Passing the Wellington Monument, it struck me that the sun was setting on something else too: youthful patience with lockdown. There were knots of young people everywhere, sitting or standing, holding picnics or just conversations. Most were making some effort to maintain approved distances, not always successfully.

The Fifteen Acres (which is at least 300 acres in reality) was largely deserted, as always. But as I headed back through there later with darkness falling, I noticed the crowds had extended even to the adjoining “Magazine Hills”.

A series of grassy humps and hollows, those are popular with cross-country runners, dog walkers, and the occasional cyclist. You rarely see anyone stationary on them, never mind sitting down. Yet even here, spaced out at random, little parties were breaking out everywhere, like a human equivalent of furze fires.