This City Street

By Hannah-Louise Dunne:

For Conn.

There is a place in the middle of the city, where seagulls greet the morning light with throaty squaks. Here, the burgeoning bright of the day will blink your eyes open, unwilling, though they might be. Below the seagulls, the city is a zigzag of bricks. A red hue where the wide Georgian streets lie. Or the cold grey of the fresh rain-washed roads and car parks that guide commuters around the corporate zones. In other places, glass flashes up and into the morning light. A brash presence, wrapping the ever-rising office blocks in bold illumination.

This is where we live, baby, before you arrive. Where we first imagined you into existence in the curved oblong surrounds of our small city-centre flat. Home now to our whole world, where each day we marvel at how much you’ve grown. 

At one time, the city centre all around us was home to lots of people. Teeming groups of humanity, packed into the small square footage of the heart of the city. There were families of ten or more packed with no consideration for their health or safety into small one-roomed tenements down near the Four Courts. While up around the city’s grand squares, the newly wealthy and established aristocracy vied for prominence in the surrounds of the beautiful red brick of their tall proud townhouses.

Nowadays, the city streets are quieter. There are more offices and hotels here than people. More space for cars, conferences, tourists. Money, and more money, as the city reopens after the strange events of the last year and a half, and the streets slowly fill up with lines of traffic again and car horns beep into the midday stretch.

But if you look beyond the main streets, you can still catch glimpses of ordinary life. Of generations of families living together in the dark red brick of the flats close to Holles Street. Or families still dotted in the surrounds of the grand old houses of the city all along the tree-lined roads to Donnybrook. There are students and workers too, carefully sequestered from view in the shelter of mews houses, in unexpected apartments and studios situated above office buildings, down side-streets, and in the back of office buildings where you’ll find our small city-centre home.

It’s a funny looking place. I think most people who pass by are surprised to see a house there in the midst of the zig zag of car parks and cranes. But don’t let that shock you. There are many surprises to be found around here. Just down the road lies one of Dublin’s private parks. A sanctuary for the fortunate then and now, which we eyed with envy during the lengthy lockdown, where the lucky few could unlock the gate and luxuriate in all of that green space, as they snapped open cans of designer craft beer.  

Around that square, there are tall houses that once served as homes to some of our greatest artists. We have a print of one on the wall of our sitting room. He was the younger brother of W.B. Yeats. But truthfully, I like his work best of all the Yeats family. The bold colours of his paintings sing to me as I walk past their vast canvases on the calming walls of the nearby National Gallery. Just down the road from Jack B. Yeats along the side of Fitzwilliam Square, Mainie Jellett lived. She was one of Ireland’s first abstract painters. She saw the world and made sense of it in shapes of peculiar beauty. 

It’s not all grand houses here though. Outside our building, a charming man comes to sit each day to collect spare change from passing drivers. He mans the parking meter come rain, hail or sunshine and knows everything there is to know about what goes on around here from his perch at the bottom of the steps. When we go for our daily walks around Merrion Square, to admire the louche grandeur of Oscar Wilde’s statue once more, he regales us with tales of the street and keeps a close eye on your growth, telling me every now and then; ‘You’re getting bigger every time I see you.’ 

This is our part of Dublin, where we have watched the streets change each season.  The place where you emerged into existence.  It’s waiting here to welcome you home.

***

Hannah-Louise is a former journalist, turned advertising executive and writer, who is interested in the way our past and present intersect to form and shape us. She has written about family, places she loves, and formerly, celebrity culture, for national press publications, and is currently working on her first long-form fictional work (and growing her first child). You can follow her on Medium, or catch her avoiding books on the reality of childbirth as she searches for calm waters to swim in around Ireland.

A place of everyday magic – Lough Owel

By Hannah-Louise Dunne:

Here in the middle of Ireland, there is a lake that shines bright as a blue button in the darkest of winter days. When I was younger – much younger that is – it acted as the backdrop to long lazy summer days for my sisters and me, where we jumped off the jetty and took turns in paddling friends out to a waiting buoy on our battered surfboard.

It’s the place where I first splashed around as a toddler, and where, years later my youngest sister tested her nerve as a 3-year-old when she took a long-running jump into the deep water from the jetty. Her armbands abandoned on dry land, we watched in shock as she sailed through the air, curls flying in her wake and surfaced victorious before doggy-paddling to shore.

Many years previous to that, the lake set the scene for the dramatic drowning of the Viking, Turgesius, dispatched to his fate by the powerful King of Tara, Máel Sechnaill mac Máele Ruanaid, in 845. Captured for posterity in the Annals of Ulster, the dramatic event is recalled today in the name given to the nearby Captain’s Hill, which overlooks the shore of Lough Owel, down which Turgesius is said to have rolled to a watery grave.

Local folklore recalls a more magical past, in tales of a betrayal between two sister witches. Legend has it that one sister loaned her favourite lake from Connacht to the other sister in Leinster, only to find that her sister refused to return the lake to its rightful home.

Elsewhere, ruins of an old stone church on the lake’s Church Island are evidence of a more devout history. Once called Inis Mor, it’s said to have been home to the monastic St Loman, who centuries ago survived on his lone outpost by eating edible herbs grown on the island’s fertile ground. 

Whatever its origins, there is no denying the lake’s everyday magic, where fresh springs bubble underground to keep the water bright and clear and well-fed trout dart here and there, leading local fishermen on a merry dance around the water. While the addition of tiered diving boards to the lake offered generations of swimmers the ideal spot to cool off in the summer, and nowadays, to test their mettle in the cooler months.

But at 18, its appeal was lost to me. Back then, conceding to the pull of the lake’s cool waters meant failing in a bid for independence. So, placing its beauty firmly in my rear-view mirror, I headed for the freedom of life as a student in Galway. Nights out at Cuba, racing into lectures with the Galway rain rising in damp clouds of steam above my head, and working a variety of part-time jobs across the city kept me busy and distracted from what I’d left behind.

Visits home were rushed and infrequent, and with the focus of youth on remaining stubbornly indifferent to the hold that places you love can exert on you, the next decade and a half were spent trying out new places to call home. A stint abroad where I found myself drawn to a city intersected by water in the form of winding canals, and later a move to Dublin, where years later, life led me eventually closer and closer to the sea.

As it turns out you see, places you love stay with you always, revealing themselves in the most unexpected moments.

They are there in the re-discovery of the joy of wild-swimming, of immersion in the open water. In the feeling of perfect harmony when you surface and swim under a clear blue sky.

There over Christmas on a trip back home, when months spent in various stages of lockdown in the city put the wide-open spaces, the everyday magic of the lake, in sharp focus.

Where the unusually bright winter weather crafted an otherworldly backdrop to daily swims as dropping temperatures transformed the fresh water into cold silver sheets of ice, stretched out along either side of the diving boards.

Bathed in bright winter sun, we dipped our toes – and then our whole bodies – into the thrill of ice-swimming, marvelling as we swam alongside great floating sheets of ice underneath the winter sun.

Afterwards, groups of plump robins hopped from branch to branch as we dressed, darting closer and closer, in search of tasty treats.

It is there now for you to visit on your next trip across the country. And there for me too, when I return.

***

Hannah-Louise is a former journalist, turned advertising executive, and writer, who is interested in the way our past and present intersect to form and shape us. She has written about family, places she loves, and formerly, celebrity culture, for national press publications, and is currently building her first long-form fictional work. You can follow her on Medium, or catch her searching for calm waters to swim in around Ireland.