A brief History of Greystones

Grand Hotel

Late in the century came the red brick Grand Hotel (we call it the La Touche Hotel now). Red brick is a sign of late Victorian or Edwardian building. The little letterbox ion the red brick wall beside the hotel bears the initials V.R. Photographs in the hotel show a fairly large sailing ship moored to the quay of the newly built Greystones Harbour wall, which was built in 1840. It was a coal boat, several of which imported coal through Greystones Harbour. A photograph also shows a horse-drawn stagecoach, a tourist attraction, not in serious competition with the railway, which drove from Dublin via Cabinteely. Another photograph shows the houses on the North side of Sidmonton terrace with nothing between them and the hotel. Before the hotel was built they would have had an uninterrupted view of the sea towards Wicklow.

The Golf Course was laid out and the Pavilion built in 1895. It was a nine-hole course; the present numbers 1 & 2, and 12 to 18 are all in the vicinity of Jones's Hill. Who was Jones? It was the enterprise of the owners of the Grand Hotel that started the Golf Course. When it became an Independent Club its first president was the Lord Powerscourt of the Day.

Killincarrick house, which in 1923 became the Clydagh Hotel, was a military post during the war.

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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.