A brief History of Greystones

The Stones

Preamble

How many of your know a book called "The Stones of Bray" by Cannon Digby Scott, the father of Miss Jessie Scott of Knockdolian in Church Lane? He was rector of Bray and the book was published in 1913. He begins the geology and moves from there into archaeology and history. He begins with the stones of Bray Head - Cambrian rocks, staggeringly ancient compared with the short span of human history.

From Bray Head to the Murrough of Wicklow there stretches a dozen miles of low, soft easily eroded shore, broken only by this one outcrop of hard Cambrian rock on which this building stands, rising out of the sea and reaching a modest summit at the top of Jones's Hill. I am told that about 70 years ago in Bray there was an old man who used to talk about The Stones. So and so had been to The Stones [he would say but] he himself had not been to The Stones for a long time. If asked by a stranger "What Stones?" he would have replied "Why the grey stones, of course". The rocks jutting into the sea outside the new St David's school used to be marked on maps and charts as "The Grey Stones". There is no record of human habitation on this rock of ours till very late in history so I will begin by saying something about the surrounding district.

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Hawkins-Whitshed & La Touche families

1690. The Battle of the Boyne followed by the Penal laws and the century of Protestant Ascendancy. For over a hundred years there was no pitched battle fought on Irish soil. The characteristic building of this period is not a monastery or a castle but the large unfortified dwelling house with its well-proportioned rows of sashed windows.

There is only one example of this period in Greystones - Killincarrick House in the wood at the top of Whitshed road, two fields away from the ruins of the first Killincarrick house. The family who built and lived in this house were called Hawkins and they owned the townland of Killincarrick and other lands further south. The boundary of the townland runs from the sea at the station, up the lane behind Killincarrig road, along the North edge of the golf course to the Bray-Kilcoole road, through Killincarrig village to Three Trout's Bridge, then down the river to the sea at Cobblers Bulk.

The two town lands of Upper and Lower Rathdown were bought early in the 18th century by the La Touche family. They belonged to that small but important element in the Irish population - the Huguenots - French Protestant refugees from the persecuting Louis XIV, who treated his Protestant subjects with the same intolerance that the then Irish Protestant Parliament was showing against their Roman Catholic fellow countrymen.

The La Touches let Rathdown Castle fall into ruins and built their big house with its French name, Bellevue, high on the south west of Kendlestown hill, their estate extended as far inland as the Glen of the Downs.