It may have been recently known as the boarded-up Baily Court Hotel. Yet for many in Howth, it was still the modestly-sized Royal Hotel. Once upon a time, it was the heart of the village, a reminder that way back in the day, Howth was seen as the main ferryport for Dublin, with the Royal Hotel – formerly the Stagecoach Inn – providing overnight accommodation when needed for cross-channel travellers awaiting (or recovering from) their seagoing ship experiences.
TWO FAILED HARBOURS
Going beyond that, it was a reminder that in the early 1800s, both of the artificial harbours constructed in the Greater Dublin region had failed in their original declared objectives. For after the Act of Union in 1801, as ship sizes increased, the larger packet boats maintaining the key and expanding government mail and administrative personnel links between Dublin and London had found themselves increasingly relying on the greater freedom of movement available off Howth.
The distinctive double gable end of the Royal Hotel with the Martello Tower beyond. We can date this photo precisely to the 1880s, as the largest yacht in the harbour is Judge Boyd’s yawl Aideen, which he based at Howth throughout that decade, making a pioneering cruise round Ireland in 1889. Photo: HYC
There, in the natural shelter in Howth Sound inside Ireland’s Eye, their increasingly demanding anchoring requirements were better met than in the flukey and restricted conditions of Dalkey Sound, while Dublin itself was limited by its very shallow bar. Nevertheless for ordinary travellers, Dublin was of course the less expensive option, provided they were prepared to spend time waiting in the Pigeon House Hotel for tides and winds and the necessary small craft to take them out to basic cross-channel ships that were waiting as best they could in Dublin Bay.
HOWTH FOR ELITE
But for the elite, Howth was the preferred choice for the likelihood of speedier cross-channel travel, even if on the other side they fetched up at Parkgate on the Dee Estuary in Cheshire, as some years were to pass before the great Scottish civil engineer Thomas Telford had completed his roadways through Wales with their Menai Bridge to access the much-nearer Holyhead.
FIXED OFFICIAL MINDSET
Thus the official mindset was soon so conditioned by the route through Howth that when moves began to provide a proper ferry port for Dublin, it was assumed it would be at Howth. Work began in 1807, yet even by the time the first steam-powered paddleship arrived in 1816, it was apparent the shallow and largely-tidal new harbour was of limited value, even if the old hostelry in the village had upped its game with a name-change from the Stagecoach Inn to the Royal Hotel in 1810.
Putting the best possible spin on the new cross-channel steamship service, which ran from Howth from 1816 to 1834. The semi-drying harbour is shown at High Water Springs and clearly dominated by Howth Castle, while the fishing fleet are obligingly staying outside the to provide maximum space for the ferry to make a celebratory circuit
Boarding the first paddle-steamer ferry from Howth in 1816 – “forming an orderly queue” was still a concept barely in its infancy
Meanwhile on Dublin Bay, the loss of ships in onshore gales - one of them a crowded troopship – resulted in increased agitation for the provision of a breakwater at Dunleary, on which construction started in 1817. It ultimately developed into the large-scale Asylum Harbour whose breakwaters we know today.
But while the official plan was that this impressive new structure should only provide shelter when urgently needed, with no direct contact at all between ship and shore, some maritime entrepreneurs soon began using it for private enterprise cross-channel ferry services. And ashore the place became Kingstown after a royal visit in 1821 to establish a fashionable township just waiting to happen.
KINGSTOWN RAILWAY MARKED PIVOTAL YEAR OF 1834
The advent of the first passenger railway in Ireland between Dublin and Kingstown meant that 1834 was the pivotal year, for although the railway didn’t begin operating until December, earlier that year the decision had been made to transfer mailboat operations from Howth to Kingstown.
Dun Laoghaire/Kingstown had been intended purely as a harbour of refuge with no shoreside amenities, yet it seemed to become the Mailboat Harbour with full on-pier railway connections almost overnight in 1834. Photo: Facebook
Quite how the Royal Hotel in Howth survived in the lean years that followed before the port became a fishery harbour served by the railway in 1846 is anybody’s guess. But somehow the peninsula increased in prosperity to such an extent that in 1899 the impressive new Church of the Assumption was consecrated in Howth village, its builder the Wicklow stonemason William Lacy. He and his family stayed on in Howth, and they’ve currently reached William Lacy V, an Afloat.ie “Sailor of the Month” in March for his role in UCD’s championship success in the Intervarsities at Schull.
The old Royal Hotel in Howth was barely hanging in after the ferries moved to Kingstown, but it was clearly still serving horse-drawn traffic. Photo: Facebook
The new church nears completion in the 1890s, providing the south side of the village’s central “plaza”. Photo: courtesy Billy O’Boyle’s Barbers
The new church contributed to the village centre feeling of the roomy space – plaza you might almost say - overlooked by the Royal Hotel, where originally the road had been widened to enable the stage-coaches to swing round in front of the inn before re-tracing their route back to Dublin, thereby avoiding the challenge of the glorified lanes that ran to the summit. That said, in stage-coach times the inn had stabling facilities as well. And then in 1901, the opening of the Sutton & Howth Electric Tramway to circle the hill brought another transport option to add to the buzz and the peninsula’s sustainable population.
MAGIC TIME OF SHOPPING BALANCE IN HOWTH VILLAGE
Thus in time other businesses opened around the village central area framed by the church, the hotel, and the row of shops along the west side.
Memories are probably rose-tinted, but there seems to have been a magic time when we had the Royal Hotel in its Baily Court phase, the church looking just right without the spire which had once been intended, and other reasonably proportioned premises including primary school, doctor’s surgery, optician’s consulting room, general store and post office with newsagents (now a Centra), greengrocers, flower shop, off-license, restaurant (The House), physiotherapy clinic, gift shop, coffee shop, butcher’s, a couple of hairdressers, McDermott’s pharmacy (there since 1899), library, and Health Centre, all of it book-ended by three pubs - the Top House, the Harbour Bar (aka The Cock Tavern), and the Abbey Tavern that traces its origins back to the mediaeval Howth abbey.
Civilised balance – darkness sees the church, the bars and restaurants, and the yacht club the most brightly floodlit buildings in Howth. Photo: HYC
It’s a thriving local community heart that remains largely unknown to the low-spend day visitors who arrive at the harbourside Dart station from Dublin, and then get shovelled along the waterfront straight towards the Cliff Path. And for those who lived in or about it, Howth’s centre remained pleasingly complete even though what had been the modestly-sized Royal Hotel was neatly-enough boarded up. But now the Royal is gone, and we’re working towards a scenario where it will be replaced by the new access road to an apartment development. This means, should anyone wish it, that Howth’s compact retail and services centre could accurately be re-named The Seven Roads End Plaza.
PRECISION STRIKE ON OLD HOTEL?
But as Gerry Sinnott’s new photo (top) reveals, removing the former hotel currently looks as though a drone missile has arrived bang on target, leaving the attractive community-related parish church and other adjacent buildings impressively intact, yet wiping out the old Royal Hotel completely.
This has been done to provide access for developers to the formerly difficult-to-reach vacant area close south of Howth’s Martello tower (also the radio museum), opening up an elevated housing location above Balscadden Bay (Balscadden is “Herring-town”) where they’ll have three residential blocks with a total of 180 apartments.
CGI of the new Balscadden development at Howth – its new access road means that there are now seven streets or roads coming into Howth village’s central “plaza”
CLAREMONT CROWD
As the longer-established Howth clans are people who like to have a bit of space around them, some will think of this new crowded space as Sardine Street rather than Herring Town. And as the other new Howth development down along Claremont Beach will be providing an astonishing 512 apartments including a 240 sqm crèche - babies are big in Howth - pessimists are expecting the peninsular access road through Sutton Cross to frequently become jam-packed, and will probably demand a tunnel.
FRESH CREW POTENTIAL
The more positively-minded in the sailing community will be seeing this fresh population influx as a useful source of potential crewing talent, while others will remember that when the Pandemic Lockdown was at its height, the Howth Peninsula effectively became a single isolation bubble. And it did very well on it too, with Howth YC membership soaring within a place that was rapidly acquiring a much stronger sense of its own special identity.
Howth in gentler times, before the harbour redevelopments began in the 1960s
ALL DONE DESPITE LACK OF HOTELS
All this is being done with a significant lack of hotels. It’s a self-inflicted wound, as in times past people would come and stay in a Howth hotel and decide they like the place so such they wanted to live there. So to meet this demand, hotels large and small were knocked, with housing and apartment developments replacing them.
The Royal Hotel as many Howth folk will remember it, expanded but still recognisabe, and prospering steadily under the ownership and management of the Hanratty family. Photo: Facebook
But even as the last memories of the Royal Hotel are carted away, help seems to be on the way in the unlikely form of Mixed Martial Arts World Champion Conor McGregor and some associates in a hospitality development company. In a place like Howth, there’d be something seriously wrong with any private development proposal that didn’t draw opposition, and The Irish Times has the story here
THE UPWARDLY MOBILE CASSIDYS
Senior-plus Howth folk will remember the proposed four storey boutique hotel development premises of the Waterside as having been Cassidy’s, a place of character that was affixed – more or less – to the conveniently-sized cliff face in such a way that in the weird five years between 1982 and 1987 when the marina was complete but the new clubhouse was still to be built, village-dwelling HYC sailors more or less made the Waterside their clubhouse.
Its convenience was such you could enter at harbour front level though the Waterside, and with judicious use of secret stairways, could exit at the top through a place which had become Cassidy’s, after a pint or two on each floor. This would have been fine and dandy except that the hurdle of Pat Kenny’s Lighthouse Bar was right on the threshold at village level, and you’d to make your number there too, as Pat was a keen Quarter Tonner racer.
Howth quietly includes a lot of history, with the remains of the early-Mediaeval abbey above the marina. Photo: Facebook
But now the Cassidys are long gone, but most emphatically not to nowhere. Constance Cassidy is chatelaine of Lissadell on the Sligo coast, and her twin brother Frank – having won a major Irish Cruising Club trophy last year - is convening the Cruising Group in the National Yacht Club after a distinguished international legal career that culminated in a major posting to Brussels for the EU.
Back at Cassidy base meanwhile, the McGregor of McGregor is now apparently making the scene. When you’re in a little place that has seen Tristan the Breton, Granuaille, Jonathan Swift, William Butler Yeats, Leopold Bloom, Erskine Childers, Edwin Lutyens and The Ginger Man himself making their mark at various times, it’s just another part of an everyday life which, if it includes a boutique hotel with ultra-boxing connections emerging from what formerly Cassidy’s, will still seem to be merrily running along.
