Dublin Dossier Pat Keenan on happenings in and around the capital
Life and death on Baggot Street
The best part of my working life was spent in and around Baggot Street, They were mostly good times, good memories. It is only recently I discovered a darker side. In all those good years I danced at Zhivagos to the sounds of Abba, it was where many of my love stories began, some ended there too. They were the days of hopeful business meetings, of ‘happy-hour’ drinking with good and bad company, of extended lunch hours in snug basement cafés, sometimes business related, sometimes romantic.
Baggotsrath Castle was previously on a site that today would be the junction of Waterloo Road and Baggot Street, about where The Waterloo and Searsons pubs now stand.
This was the Baggot Street I knew. But before it was named Baggot Street in 1773 it was known as Gallows Road, a very different place. You might say it was where lives ended. The street was named after Sir Robert Bagod, then the presiding judge of the Court of Common Pleas, one of the Dublin Four Courts. He built Baggotrath Castle on a site that today would be the junction of Waterloo Road and Baggot Street, about where ‘The Waterloo’ and Searsons pubs now stand. The castle, said to have been the best fortified in Ireland, became embroiled in many battles during the years of English Civil War and was finally left in ruins following the Battle of Rathmines in 1649. And that’s how it remained until it was demolished and removed in the early 19th century by Dublin Corporation to facilitate the extension that today is Baggot Street Upper. Interestingly, the name Baggotrath still exists.The laneway from Baggot Street Lower down along the side of Tescos Supermarket leading to Fitzwilliam Lane is Baggotrath Place. In my heydays, the entrance to Zhivago was down here. Gallows Hill stood ominously on a mound of ground on what today would be the corner of Fitzwilliam and Baggot Street Lower - roughly opposite where Larry Murphys pub now stands. In medieval Dublin it was a place of execution. In 1705 Joshua Dawson, the man that gave his name to Dawson Street, hired a well known ‘priest hunter,’ Edward Tyrell, to catch priests on the run for not signing up to an act renouncing James III’s claim to the English throne. In a twist of fate Tyrell himself was hanged here for 44 Senior Times l September - October 2020 l www.seniortimes.ie
the crime of bigamy and was later strung up on Misery Hill. This was a common practice, corpses of the executed were usually carted over to Misery Hill and left there to rot and decay as a warning to other would-be lawbreakers. Misery Hill is still there - more on this later. Two of Robert Emmet’s followers were also hanged on Gallows Hill in 1803. Emmet himself was executed in front of St.Catherine’s Church on Thomas Street. But perhaps the strangest and most notorious execution here was that of Dorcas ‘Darkey’ Kelly in 1761. She ran the Maiden Tower brothel in Copper Alley, off Fishamble Street. The notorious Sheriff of Dublin, Simon Luttrell, 1st Earl of Carhampton, and probably a client, accused her of witchcraft. She had accused him of fathering her baby and demanded his financial support. She further accused him of killing her baby in a Satanic ritual at the Hellfire Club up on Montpelier Hill in the Dublin mountains. Luttrell countered with the accusation that she killed their baby. The body of the baby was never found.
