Restoring Dublin’s Old City Wall
25 Aug 1970If you can obtain a copy of Speed’s map of Dublin, 1610—probably the most authentic with which to follow the outline of the lost walls of Dublin — an interesting and speculative afternoon ramble can be enjoyed in trying to assess their location. Claudius Ptolemy, an eminent Alexandrian geographer, mathematician and astronomer who flourished early in the second century, is credited with being the first writer to mention Dublin. He records it as “Eblana, a city.” He may have heard the name from Mediterranean mariners who had sailed the Irish coast and so the word could be an oriental rendering of the ancient Irish Dubh linne, or the Latin Duvelina. Ptolemy’s manuscript was first translated into Arabic in A.D. 827 and then into Latin about A.D. 1230. It is quite possible, therefore, the initial letter “D” got lost somewhere.
The infant city of Ptolemy’s time stood on the high eastern extremity of the isthmus between the confluence of the Liffey and the Poddle, and may have taken its name from the dubh linn, or “black pool” formed by the latter river which stretched over a large area from the Castle garden to St. Patrick’s Park. Like all ancient cities it probably had a wall of some kind around it, but hardly one of greater defensive strength than that of a stockade or bawn.
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