Up the creek at the “Poddle Millrace”
3 Jun 1973Sir —
Your columnist Des Hickey is respectfully a bit up the creek when he writes of his “new” discovery of the Poddle millrace in William Talbot’s back garden at 6 Sweeney Terrace. Anybody would have thought he was Stout Corte or something tripping upon it for the first time. Anybody, however, living around there could have told, him that it has been a favourite paddling pool, fishing ground and general playground for local gurriers over the centuries.
A man is rumoured to have drowned in it, not twenty years ago. And I’m afraid it isn’t the Poddie alone, either: it is the confluence of the watercourse connecting the Dodder to the Poddle, upon the site of the mill built by the monks of St. Thomas the Martyr after the remorseful” Henry II granted them the Liberty, of Saint Thomas in Becket’s memory.
So there y’are. You can reach it from the back of Warrenmount Convent as well, and Des Hickey is entirely right when he says it’s in a bit of a shocking state and in need of some loving care. But then, so is the, rest, of the Poddle. I pointed this put when I followed the course of the Poddle from Tymon Lane with Sister Ann. Dominica FitzGerald, O.P., the well-known Poddleologist — in an issue of Women First, the “Irish Times,” last January.
Ann FitzGerald, by the way, has;written the story of the Poddle from earliest times and through all its wanderings in “The Liberties of Dublin” (E. T. O’Brien) —- which is coming out in a fortnight. I suppose I ought to add that I edited it not to mislead – you over my interest.
I’ve been told there’s a trapdoor in the Olyrnpia’ Theatre which you can raise and see the Poddle on its last run under Dollards the printers before merging with the Liffey. I never succeeded in seeing it’ so I don’t know if this is true, but I’d love to find out.
—- ALGY GILLESPIE 31 Westmoreland Street, Dublin.