Two Poddle bridges

Two Poddle bridges

16 Oct 1972

Through the courtesy of the White Swan Laundry, Liam was able to make this drawing from a foot bridge over a branch of the Poddle, where the ancient river disappears under a second bridge, beneath Donore Avenue, once known as Love Lane. This branch ol the Poddle was taken off near the modern Mount Jerome, for the use of St. Thomas’s Abbey, which at the suppression of the monasteries, 1540, was found to have four waterrrrills worked by this stream, the Wattle Mill, the Wood Mill, and the Double Mills.
Father Myles V. Ronan, in a paper he wrote on the Poddle and its branches, puts the date of the making of this stream as between 1245 and 1324, for of course the whole line of the Poddle is an artificial stream, a very remarkable bit of mediaeval engineering. After the Reformation, when the Brabazons took over the lands of St. Thomas’s Abbey from the Augustinian Canons of St. Victor, this stream was known as “the Earl of Meath’s Watercourse”.

View News Article Online