A brief History of Greystones

First School

For the year 1838 we have a most important historical document - the first Ordnance survey map. It shows a scatter of less than a dozen houses on the south side of the harbour and a road, the present Rathdown road, connecting them with Blacklion. One of the houses is marked 'School' but there is no church and nothing but empty fields once you leave the neighbourhood of the harbour, nothing like a village street; there is not even a man-made harbour, just rocks jutting into the sea where the pier now begins, offering some shelter from all but North Easterly winds.

St David's

In 1942 the Holy Faith Convent bought one of the houses on the sea front called St David's and opened a small secondary school for girls. It is now a 500 strong co-educational school. I once had to take the chair at school's debating competition in which debaters took part; four teams two from four different schools. The winning team, one girl and one boy came from St David's. You may have read Christina Murphy's article in praise of it in the Irish Times.

CBS

...The new Christian Brothers school on Rathdown Road, which replaced the school, near the sawmills at the top of church Lane. The great expansion of building around the New Road dates from the 1950s and 1960s.

St Patrick's National School

The Church of Ireland built their St Patrick's Hall in the 1950s; before that they had used the old national school where Percy French had once recited and sung and drawn his lightening sketches. The big new National school has succeeded it on the level ground near the railway at the bottom of Rathdown Road.

Colleges

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.

Schools Gallery

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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.