A brief History of Greystones

The Burnaby

At the beginning of this 20th century, the Burnaby agent, Mr Wynne, decided to lay out a portion of the estate as a well planned residential district, what we call the Burnaby. In 1903, the tenant farmers of Ireland had been enabled to buy their farms from the landlords with money advanced by the government on east terms. The farsighted Mr Wynne decided that leasehold residential property would provide an assured income for the estate in place of rents from farms. Most of Killincarrig townland remained a home farm managed by a branch of the Evans family who lived in the old house now known as Killincarrick Farm House, to distinguish it from the new Killincarrick House by the sea. Mrs Burnaby married again, was widowed again and was married a third time to a Mr LeBlond. The law was that all farm carts must have the owners name painted on the shafts and I can remember in the 1920s long before the days of tractors, the big cart horses drawing carts with E. LeBlond on the shafts.

Red Brick

On the residential part of the estate strict leases prevented any kind of commercial activity not even the keeping of hens. In contrast to the rather austere greyness of the older Greystones many of the Burnaby houses were red brick, had steeply pitched red tiled roofs, bow windows, verandas and gable ends were prominent. There were private tennis courts (grass - not hard courts) in many of the gardens.

The two pillar-boxes and the wall box on the Burnaby all have the initials E. VII R, King Edward VII. Houses like the Burnaby houses can be seen on King Edward Road in Bray and Kerrymount Avenue in Foxrock. We have seen the significance of most of the road names on The Burnaby of Whitshed, Portland, St Vincent and Burnaby roads. Kinlen Road was named after a building contractor who, after building Kinlen road built the second of the Roundwood reservoirs. But why did the names Somerby and Erskine appear? The Presbyterian Manse was first on Somerby Road and then on Killincarrig Road.

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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.