A brief History of Greystones

Raths

If you take the road from Redford to Little Sugar Loaf, where you reach the highest point, there is a T-junction. Just before this junction you can climb over a gate into a field on your left; cross two fields and you come to a place where four fields meet at a circular enclosure - a ditch of earth crowned by a hedge. This is the Rath of Cool na Skeagh and it is the most ancient trace of human settlement near greystones.

Rath - Bally and Kill are characteristic beginnings of Irish place names. A rath was a circular rampart of loose stones and earth crowned by a wooden paling, inside which a few families with their livestock would live in little thatched huts. All this was long before there were any towns. Canon Scott asks us to imagine the people of Cool na Skeagh looking down to the sea in 432 A.D., and seeing a ship sailing northwards- Patrick's ship. He had landed on the Murrough at Wicklow and not been welcomed there so he was sailing northwards to make his next landing at an island off Skerries that we call Holmpatrick or Innispatrick-St Patrick's Island.

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.