Qualla: Phoenix Park

Phoenix Park: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit DorinRodina, CC BY-SA 3.0. Inside an eleven-kilometre stone wall, just west of central Dublin, seven hundred and seven hectares of grassland and tree-lined avenues hold one of the strangest assemblages on the European continent. Wild fallow deer graze where Norman knights once held land. A sixty-two-metre Wellington obelisk - the largest in Europe - stands at one end. A thirty-five-metre Papal Cross stands at the other, where a million Dubliners gathered in 1979 to hear Pope John Paul II celebrate Mass. Two ambassadors live behind the wall, and so does the President of Ireland. This is Phoenix Park, an Irish landscape so densely layered with history that the Irish Government has formally asked UNESCO to call it a World Heritage Site.

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Image: DorinRodina | CC BY-SA 3.0

Phoenix Park: A Hunting Park for the Duke

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alex Lozupone, CC BY-SA 4.0. The name comes from a mishearing. In Irish the area was Fionn Uisce, "clear water," referring to a spring on the slope. English ears turned that into Phoenix, and Sir Edward Fisher built a country house here in 1611 and called it the House of the Phoenix. The land had belonged to...

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Image: Alex Lozupone | CC BY-SA 4.0

Phoenix Park: The Phoenix Park Murders

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Spleodrach, CC BY-SA 4.0. On the evening of 6 May 1882, Lord Frederick Cavendish and Thomas Henry Burke - the newly appointed Chief Secretary for Ireland and his Under-Secretary - were walking from Dublin Castle to the Viceregal Lodge across the park's central avenue. Members of a small republican splinte...

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Image: Spleodrach | CC BY-SA 4.0

Phoenix Park: Deer, Decimus Burton and the Wellington Obelisk

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JP, CC BY-SA 2.0. The herd of fallow deer descends, almost unbroken, from animals introduced by the Duke of Ormond in the 1660s. Between four hundred and four hundred and fifty of them still graze under the oaks. Three hundred and fifty-one plant species have been identified inside the wall, three...

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Image: JP | CC BY-SA 2.0

Phoenix Park: A Pope, a Grand Prix and a Cricket Club

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit N Chadwick, CC BY-SA 2.0. On 29 September 1979 the Papal Cross was raised at the edge of the Fifteen Acres, a great white steel structure thirty-five metres high. Workers erected it only a fortnight before Pope John Paul II arrived. The congregation at his open-air Mass numbered roughly one million - equa...

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Image: N Chadwick | CC BY-SA 2.0