A brief History of Greystones

Coastguard

The coastguards in their big building beside the Cove remained undisturbed. Early in July 1921 they decorated the Flagpole outside Clifden, at the corner near the harbour, with a full display of coloured flags and bunting because King George V was sailing up the Irish sea to Belfast to open the first Parliament of Northern Ireland in the City Hall.

After the Treaty of December 1921, the Coast Guards disappeared and the new Civic Guards used their quarters. The records of the Presbyterian Church contain the significant entry "Constable Middleton and Mrs Middleton gone back to Scotland", "Constable Grant gone away". The small town/big village of Greystones (the population was about 800, less than one tenth of what it is now) was unique in the new Free State in having a Protestant majority. Sunday was still observed in the traditional way.

Leisure

In 1920 the golf Club debated whether or not they should open the links on Sunday. In July and august the South beach, the Cove and the Men's' Bathing Place were almost deserted on a Sunday and the Tennis Club on the Delgany road, the tennis courts of the Grand Hotel and the private tennis courts in the gardens of the Burnaby houses were unused.) The modern floodlit hard courts opposite the la Touche Hotel are only about 20 years old.4

The letter boxes were now painted green and Free state soldiers in their green uniforms could be see wearing black arm bands in mourning for their commander in chief, Michael Collins, who was killed in an ambush in County Cork in August 1922.

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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.