A brief History of Greystones

Bray Head

Before and during the war, the railway was harassed by the problem of coast erosion. All the way from Killiney to Bray a new line was built parallel to the original, and about a quarter mile inland. On Bray Head you can still seen an empty tunnel where the line was moved in, and a new tunnel the "Half Mile Tunnel" was built. This is the last tunnel you go through if travelling from Bray to Greystones. It is 100 yards long, not quite half a mile. You enter it looking down into the sea and emerge in a cutting with green fields on either side. A feature of this tunnel is the chimney in the middle of a field on the hillside. When a train, a real steam train that is, disappears there is a pause of perhaps a minute and a puff of smoke comes out of the chimney.

The engineer of this project, which was carried out in 1917, was Mr William Hinde who then retired from practice and lived at Selston on Whitshed Road; his wife was an accomplished water-colour painter and has left many pictures of Greystones and County Wicklow. Their daughter lives at Khiva, a house to which I have already mentioned.

Cliff Walk

For years the old railway line provided an easy walk from the harbour to the north end of the half mile tunnel and from it began the cliff walk to Bray; the bridge at the bottom of Ennis's lane was still standing and on the seaward side of it, a still older bridge with the embankment to right and left of it was washed away. All this was part of a far more ambitious scheme which lack of funds did not allow the railway company to undertake. They had hoped to abandon the entire line from Bray Head to the Murrough of Wicklow, to use an alternative route from the south end of the new tunnel passing to the west of Jones's Hill, along the line of the Kilcoole-Newcastle road. A new Greystones station would have been built in the hollow where the 15th green of the golf course is, "The Pig's Hollow". The new Kilcoole and |Newcastle stations would have been far more convenient for most of their users.

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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.