Qualla: Rathfarnham

Rathfarnham: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pampuco, CC BY-SA 4.0. On Easter Sunday morning, 1916, Patrick Pearse cycled out of the gates of the Hermitage in Rathfarnham and turned north toward Dublin. He would never come back. By the following Friday he was a leader of the Easter Rising and the signatory of a Proclamation read outside the General Post Office; by 3 May he was dead, executed by firing squad at Kilmainham Gaol. The granite-faced house he was leaving behind had been his school, St Enda's, where he had tried to invent a new kind of Irish education in a building once decorated with fake dolmens and a hermit's cave built by an eighteenth-century dentist with too much money and too much imagination.

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Image: Pampuco | CC BY-SA 4.0

Rathfarnham: On the Edge of the Pale

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AndrewH at English Wikipedia, Public domain. Rathfarnham village grew up around a fortification at a ford on the River Dodder, on the southern edge of the Pale - the medieval enclave of Anglo-Norman control around Dublin. The Wicklow Mountains rose just beyond, and the Gaelic clans who lived in them did not consider the Pal...

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Image: AndrewH at English Wikipedia | Public domain

Rathfarnham: The Dentist's Antiquities

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JP, CC BY-SA 2.0. Across the Dodder from the castle stood the Hermitage, an eighteenth-century granite-fronted house bought by Edward Hudson, an eminent Dublin dentist with a passion for Irish antiquities and the income to indulge it. Hudson did not collect antiquities so much as fabricate them. A...

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Image: JP | CC BY-SA 2.0

Rathfarnham: St Enda's

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sheila1988, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1910 Patrick Pearse leased the Hermitage from its then-owner, William Woodburn, and moved his Irish-language school St Enda's into the building. Cullenswood House in Ranelagh, where he had founded the school the previous year, was too cramped for his ideas about outdoor educat...

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Image: Sheila1988 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Rathfarnham: The Priory and the Lost Grave

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sarah777, Public domain. Directly opposite St Enda's stood the Priory, home of the great orator and barrister John Philpot Curran. In October 1792 Curran's twelve-year-old daughter Gertrude died after falling from a window. He buried her in the grounds of the Priory and laid over the grave a stone slab i...

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Image: Sarah777 | Public domain

Rathfarnham: Marlay and the Yellow House

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. Modern Rathfarnham is built around its surviving green spaces and its old pubs. Marlay Park - the eighteenth-century estate of the La Touche banking family - became a public park in 1975, and since the early 2000s has hosted summer concerts on a scale that pulls in headliners. Ae...

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Image: CC BY-SA 3.0