Category: History

Dublin City Council have an article on their website about the former Dolphin’s Barn brickworks.

RTE have an article on their site about Carlisle Bridge in Dublin – predecessor to O’Connell Bridge.

RTE have archive footage about the lighthouse on The Bull off the Beara Peninsula in Co. Cork, which was taken in 1979. One of the ‘mod cons’ noted as available to the lighthousekeepers was a TV. I wonder did they have a TV licence?

RTE’s 100 Buildings series has an article about the Carroll’s tobacco factory in Dundalk.

RTE are running a series – 100 Buildings – which is a look at 100 features in Irish structures.

One of these articles looks at the building of electricity substations as part of the electrification of Ireland that followed the commissioning of the Ardnacrusha power station.

An interesting fact therein is that the ESB in house designer who produced the early ESB logo, which was a wave and thunderbolt design that can still be seen on some structures around the country, also worked as a freelancer and in this capacity, designed the flying snail logo for the Dublin United Tramway Company (which was retained by CIE upon its creation in 1945).

DublinLive.ie has a feature looking at the Guinness Brewery in the 1950s, including images of the building that is now the Storehouse.

RTE is running a series on their website called “100 buildings“, which is a select look at 100 Buildings of 20th Century Ireland.

One of the structures featured is the Poolbeg Chimneys in Dublin.

I was processing the photos I took last weekend and when doing those of Arva Road, I reckoned something was wrong and it was this photo that caused me concern:

My narrative of the station is that there was a single platform at the station on the Up side (right hand side). Clearly this photo shows two platforms. In addition, the station building, the roof of which can be seen left of centre, doesn’t really fit with the station building being on the right (it is clearly on the left).

Nowadays with the OS 25 inch maps online and available to view from the comfort of your home and without gatekeepers (it is unlikely I would have been able to produce the Gazetteer 15 years ago as the online resources did not exist), I was able to go back to map.geohive.ie to check out what the story was.

The image above is of the goods area at Arva Road, which was on the Up (right hand) side before the station. The single platform was beyond this (in the photo above, it would have been to the left of the station building).

Absent this map information, I would have assumed that Arva Road was a standard 2 platform station, as this is what it looks like on the ground.

There was also a goods store here, which would have been on the loading bank on the right. It has obviously been demolished.

When railway lines were being constructed (primarily in the mid to late 19th century), the issue of how to deal with water bodies, rivers in particular, was one that engineers had to deal with.

For a straightforward encounter with a river heading in a different direction to the line of railway, a bridge was the obvious solution. However, where a river or stream ran roughly parallel to the proposed railway and cut back and forth across the route, this would require multiple bridges. In such a case, deviating and canalising the river to a dedicated channel on one side of the railway would potentially be a better option. In the case below, by canalising and deviating the river, 4 bridges are avoided.

There were many such cases of this practice – one that I have become aware of when researching something else (the location of Sparrowsland temporary terminus – see post below) was the deviation of a stream adjacent to the site of the temporary terminus.

Unfortunately, 2 of the 3 online map sources that I used to determine this don’t allow deep linking, never mind embedding – as such, cannot be reproduced here.

The three sources are:

map.geohive.ie (use co-ordinates 696460,631312)

landdirect.ie (no search facility that I am aware of – the location is immediately west of Macmine in Wexford. The site does display the same co-ordinates as used by geohive.ie but with no way to directly go there)

Googlemaps – embedded below:

Looking at the googlemap image above, the dark line running roughly left to right across the centre is the stream in question.

Reverting to the oldest map of the area – the 25″ OS map on geohive.ie, there is a clear u bend in the river east of the road running north – south (roughly centre of the image above). This is odd, because if you overlay the earlier (pre railway) 6 inch map on this on the site, the river was straightened out east of this point to allow the railway to be built. Why they left this bend rather than canalising the river and reducing the need to buy an awkward peninusla for a location that was only ever going to be a temporary terminus is lost to time.

Moving on in time, from the Googlemap image above (and the modern day map on geohive.ie), the bend in the river is gone (see image above). However, there is an interesting aspect connected with this. The landdirect.ie website (showing parcels of land registered with the Land Registry) clearly shows the adjacent property with a site boundary following the original river line – complete with bend. The land occupied by the railway is not on the Land Registry* and is not specifically delinated, except by exception (i.e. other sites being registered marks it out by being what is left). As such, it would appear that the railway company did buy this piece of land, including the peninsula up to the original river boundary but deviation of the river since has isolated it.

* There are two parallel systems of land ownership registration in Ireland – the Land Registry and the Registry of Deeds. An analysis of this is beyond the scope of this site – however, it is sufficient to note that land on the latter, when sold going forward, will move to the former and will also then appear as a delineated site on the landdirect.ie website. In fact, when I sold my previous house in Celbridge in 2018, the property underwent this transfer – I had to pay for a 5 minute job involving a “surveyor” with one of those laser distance measuring devices to take 3 or 4 measurements around the property boundary. I understand that the purchaser of the house had it worse, as they had to pay a more substantial fee to the Land Registry to formalise the transfer!

As for the question why isn’t the railway site on the Land Registry? When the railways were closed, if the land was sold in full compliance with transfer rules (this is a can of worms beyond the scope of this post), this was in the days before the process of transferring property to the Land Registry and as such, the land would not be on the Land Registry until sold again.

It may also still be in CIE “ownership” but with squatters rights having being ceded to adjacent landowners. A full paper could probably be written on these issues.