The Hills are Alive – Frank McNally on the ups and downs of Phoenix Park history

While trying to explain the features of certain Dublin landscape paintings recently (Irishman’s Dairy, March 17th & 19th), I found myself poring over an 1816 map of the Phoenix Park. The map is fascinating mainly because of the various man-made (and mostly military) structures that have since disappeared, including the gargantuan “StarFort”, “Artillery Butt”, and “Salute battery”.

But on closer inspection, I was also delighted to see that, sketchy as the topographical drawings are, they include two miniature valleys, just north of the Magazine Fort and forming the shape of a mouth that appears poised to swallow the words “Practice Ground”,

These are minor details on the map. And yet, unlike the Star Fort, the features they delineate survive today and will be painfully well known to many runners, especially the cross-country ones who use that corner of the park – on Saturday mornings, typically – for winter hill training.

The area is known both as the "Magazine Hills" and the "Munich Hills", the latter because of association with athletes training for the 1972 Olympics (although I've also heard talk of "Munich Hill", singular, as something the late running coach Gerry Farnham used, physically and metaphorically, to motivate a young protégé, Eamonn Coghlan).

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The area’s steepest incline – the one on which the Magazine Fort sits – is more popular with boot-campers and football teams looking for the short, sharp shock of an uphill sprint. But that little two-fingered ravine system, aka the “dips”, is a crucial, endurance-building part of the longer kilometre or mile loops favoured by the running clubs.

And it is somehow reassuring that those gullies have themselves endured in the intervening centuries, while so many features of the 1816 map have not. The Star Fort and Artillery Butt are long gone while the Magazine is a ruin, like the empire it helped build. The hills survive, meanwhile, and along with being a useful conditioner of calf muscles, now serve as a reminder of the fall and rise of civilisations.

This is what the French philosopher-historian Edward Quinet (1803-1875) was talking about in his most quoted sentence, albeit that his main theme was wild-flowers and their habit of popping up, again and again, even at the scenes of history's greatest cataclysms:

“Today, as in the days of Pliny and Columella, the hyacinth disports in Gaul, the periwinkle in Illyria, the daisy on the ruins of Numantia; and while all around them the cities have changed masters and names, while some have ceased to exist, while the civilisations have collided with each other and shattered, their peaceful generations have passed through the ages, and have come up to us, one following the other, fresh and cheerful as on the days of the battle.”

That quotation has earned literary fame thanks to a Dubliner, James Joyce. He liked it so much, both for its Mediterranean setting and as a summary of his own outlook on world history, that he dropped it whole – in the original French (slightly misquoted) – onto Page 281 of Finnegans Wake, whose theme it echoes.

The French aside, it must be the only paragraph written in conventional language, although Joyce then riffs on it in several other places. Elsewhere, for example, the hyancinths turns into “cornflowers” and the periwinkles becomes “twolips”, while Gaul, Illyria, Numantia are transformed respectively into “Goatstown, Ballymun, and Knockmaroon”.

Joyce seems to have come to the Quinet quotation via a little-known Russian writer, Léon Metchnikoff (1838 – 1888), a man who has been described as an “anarchist geographer”.

According to a French "Dictionary of Anarchists", Metchnikoff was expelled from university for revolutionary activity, fought alongside Garibaldi in Italy and later settled in Geneva, where he died aged 50.

Published posthumously, his major work was “La civilisation et les grand fleuves historiques”, (“Civilisation and the Great Historic Rivers), a history of the world in which natural waterways play a lead role. Hence the anarchist geographer description, I suppose. The book also inspired the most celebrated chapter of Finnegans Wake, the one into which Joyce puns on the names of hundreds of rivers from all over the globe.

I’m not sure if the waterways of “Fiendish Park” (another of his puns) feature by name, although much of what passes for action in FW takes place there. They would not be “Grand Fleuves” in any case. And yet many of the park’s modern contours were carved by water, the Magazine hills being no exception. One minor change since 1816 is that, according to the map, there were still streams running down both gullies then.

Now, two centuries later, that only happens after heavy rain, when the wearing of spikes is highly advisable.