Qualla: Raheny

Raheny: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Raymond Okonski, CC BY-SA 2.0. There are villages, and there are villages with paperwork. Raheny's first written mention dates to 570 AD - making the settlement older than the city it now belongs to, older than Christianity in Ireland's western counties, older than the Vikings who would eventually sail into Dublin Bay just south of here. The Old Irish word raheny preserves in its sound the structure of the place: a rath, a ringfort, the circular earthen enclosure of an Iron Age chieftain named Eanna whose name has outlasted his bones by a millennium and a half. Walk through the modern village today and you are walking across what was once his fort - its outline still visible in the curve of a graveyard wall and an embankment behind the Scout Den.

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Image: Raymond Okonski | CC BY-SA 2.0

Raheny: The Ringfort Underfoot

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit SeoR, CC BY-SA 4.0. Excavations in the 1970s suggested the rath was about 110 metres across, large enough to enclose a sizeable settlement. It would have had timber roundhouses inside its earthen banks, a defensive ditch outside, and access to a holy well dedicated to the local patron St. Assam. The...

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Image: SeoR | CC BY-SA 4.0

Raheny: Doh-Ray-Mee

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Smirkybec, CC BY-SA 4.0. On Station Road near the Howth Road junction stand eight cottages arranged in a gentle crescent, the oldest buildings in Raheny still in use. They were built around 1790 by Samuel Dick, then Governor of the Bank of Ireland, to house the men who worked his estate. The locals call ...

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Image: Smirkybec | CC BY-SA 4.0

Raheny: Bull Island and St. Anne's

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit L J Richards, Public domain. Raheny shares two of Dublin's largest municipal parks with neighbouring Clontarf. North Bull Island is a UNESCO biosphere reserve - a five-kilometre crescent of sand and dune that did not exist before 1800, accreted by tides after a sea wall was built to keep Dublin Bay navigable...

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Image: L J Richards | Public domain

Raheny: All Saints and a Wedding

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit SeoR, CC BY-SA 4.0. All Saints' Church on the Howth Road is the local Church of Ireland parish church. It is also where, in 1982, Paul Hewson married Alison Stewart - better known to the world as Bono and Ali of U2. Bono had gone to church at All Saints' growing up; he met Ali through the Mount Temp...

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Image: SeoR | CC BY-SA 4.0

Raheny: A Village That Stayed

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit All Saints' Church, Public domain. Most of Dublin's medieval villages were swallowed without trace by the twentieth-century expansion of the city. Raheny is one of the few that kept its village core - a recognisable crossroads at the heart of the modern suburb, with the spire of the 1962 Church of Our Lady Mother ...

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Image: All Saints' Church | Public domain