A brief History of Greystones

Transport

The first bus to come near Greystones was called "The Wicklow Hills", it ran from Dublin, down the Killincarrig-Kilcoole road to Rathdrum. It did not challenge the railway by a diversion through Greystones but it dew away the meagre passenger traffic from Kilcoole and Newcastle stations. In Greystones the railway still reigned supreme. There was a train known as the Greystones express or more often as the "The five-fifteen".

Starting from Amiens street it left Westland Row at 5.15 pm and stopped only at Dun Laoghaire, Dalkey, Killiney and Bray. It spent the night on the siding behind Watson and Johnson's Garage (The original Watson and Johnson's not the new one in Blacklion5), and did an equally quick journey (50 minutes I think) with the morning commuters to town. There was almost one train per hour; the frequency to town was greater at about 9 am, from town and 5 pm and 6 pm.

The important Harcourt Street train was the 6.05. In the summer it stopped at Bray only and went as far as Wicklow. If you were concentrating on your home work you might get carried on to Wicklow, for many of the commuters were schoolboys and girls: high School, Alexandra College and Wesley College were all within easy walking distance for Harcourt Street.

The mail train from Dun Laoghaire to Wexford went through early in the morning. It had a breakfast car that went to Waterford, it returned in the evening coming through Greystones at ten minutes to seven. The Rosslare Boat Train to Harcourt Street came up in the morning and went down in the evening, leaving Harcourt Street at 7.05.

In 1944, the railways, the Dublin trams, and the bus companies were combined to form C.I.E, our semi-state transport company. But until normal times returned it could only provide skeleton services. The facetious words of Percy French had come true, the guard hollers out:

There's no fuel
And the fire's totally out,
But hand up that bit of a log there
I'll soon have yis out of the fix
There's a fine crop of turf in the bog there
And the rest go and gather sticks.

Horse drawn conveyances for a year or two reasserted their supremacy over motorcars and the civilised sociability of the tea party became a rarity, (there was hardly any tea). Rationing of butter, tea and petrol continued for a year or two after the way. One way of reaching Greystones from Dublin was to take the train to Bray, then a horse dawn outside car to Windgates, and then walk the last two miles downhill.
The 84-bus service had now been started by C.I.E. and as petrol became unrationed, people began to use their own cars to travel to and from town and the railway began to lose patrons.

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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.