I didn’t need to go as far as Cork to find a street named after lepers (An Irishman’s Diary, January 16th), as reader Niall Harrington reminds me.
“I wonder if you’ve missed the leper under your nose,” he writes, pointing out that Dublin’s Townsend Street is known in Irish as Sráid Chnoc na Lobhar.
Mr Harrington also says I should remember this “from your days in UA/UB Decisions, at No.157-164” of same.
How could I forget? Not only did I spend formative years of my life in a Department of Social Welfare building (now demolished) at that address, but having escaped Lepers Hill for the balmier climes of D’Olier Street in the mid-1990s, via a job in this newspaper, I also arrived just in time for the company to move offices.
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And where did we move to? Before you could say “Unclean! Unclean!”, I was back on Sráid Chnoc na Lobhar (at the corner with Tara Street), barely 100 metres from where I started.
But we are where we are, as politicians say. Having reminded me of which, my emailer also has a question, namely: “I wonder if there’s any connection between ‘the hill of the lepers’ and ‘the end of that town’?”
It’s a good question, Mr Harrington. For clearly, there is no etymological connection between the Irish and English versions of the street’s name, not even of the warped kind that turned Cork’s Siúl na Lobhar into “Lovers Walk”.
But until recently (five minutes ago), I remained vaguely of the impression that Townsend Street was a geographically descriptive name. After all, it did once mark the point where the city met the sea, or at least the Liffey when that was much wider than now.
Hence the Long Stone, originally placed as a landing marker by the Norsemen, where the end of Pearse Street Garda station and a replica stone now stand.
Indeed, the street name came from the Marquis Townshend during his tenure as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in 1771. But even so, it remains the case that the parish of St Mark (including the church of that name on what is now Pearse Street) was built on land reclaimed from the sea here.
It’s said that the original Long Stone was covered by the Liffey at high tide and that in 1792 a boating party including the Duke of Leinster was able to land “near Merrion Square”, where Holles Street is now.
Hence also Townsend Street’s association with lepers. As an embarkation and landing place, it was once the site of an Irish lazaretto, a quarantine station and hospital named after the biblical Lazarus, patron saint of leprosy sufferers.
Hence the earlier English names for Chnoc na Lobhar, in which “Lazars” Hill became corrupted to “Lazy” and even to “Lousy” before the Marquis’s surname was superimposed.
The modern Hawkins Street (and the late unlamented Hawkins House) took its name from one of the men who reclaimed the land, building a “great wall” that was also named after him. The Great Wall of Hawkins is long gone, but that enormous new building where the Screen Cinema used to stand seems to be carrying on the monolithic spirit.
There is no obvious hill on Sráid Chnoc na Lobhar today. Perhaps the original was a feature of the old riverbank. Either way, Mr Harrington’s email reminds me of a time when I was intimately aware of every rising contour in Dublin, there or elsewhere.
During my years in Social Welfare, I lived in the far reaches of Templeogue West, near the borders with Tallaght, and commuted via my first proper bicycle, a lovely, light-as-the-wind thing of a brand named Coventry Eagle.
The journey home every evening was a 35-minute slog, because it was mostly uphill. In the morning, by contrast, I could make the descent towards the Liffey in 22 minutes flat.
There was the added incentive then of trying to avoid the dreaded “red X”. Yes, it sounds like something that was painted on your front door during medieval plagues.
Indeed it was just a mark opposite your name in the attendance book if you didn’t make it in to Lepers Hill before the 10am cut-off. But many’s a time I left the house at 9.35am and still arrived with a minute or two to spare.
On a less happy note, that last bike I owned (to date) was stolen nearby, from outside The Irish Times. I had parked it just long enough to collect something from the office, then got distracted by events including the passage down Townsend Street of 3,000 Swedish football fans en route to Lansdowne Road.
I don’t think those Norsemen pillaged my bicycle. More likely it was locals taking advantage of the distraction. But I never reported the loss to Pearse Street Garda station, perhaps because I knew that the original Long Stone was stolen from the area circa 1794 and we still await a breakthrough in the investigation.
