Places – Sandycove

Map Sandycove Martello Muglins Sea Wall
Sandycove, Google Maps
Sandycove — view at Google Maps
Sandycove Harbour
Flickr: Dark Wash, Sandycove Harbour
Sandycove Point
Sandycove Point
Sandycove — a quiet residential neighbourhood, bordering Glasthule. Sandycove Point marks the southern tip of Dublin Bay. It features a harbour (now popular as a family beach), an old artillery battery (which conceals the Forty Foot), and the famed Martello tower (now the James Joyce Museum).

Sandycove 1920s
Sandycove Point, 1920s
"Immediately adjoining Glasthule is Sandycove, a name which originated with the little haven there, and was subsequently applied to the rocky point on which a battery or fort, now dismantled, and a Martello tower were erected. The fort was, until a few years ago, occupied by the military, and at certain seasons of the year was utilised for artillery practice, the firing causing much havoc among the windows of the adjoining houses." – Weston St. John Joyce, The Neighbourhood of Dublin, 1920.

Sandycove then, as now, was a haven of terraced villas and detached lodges, the preferred residence of the genteel and the retired – and of Synge, Yeats, Heaney ...

Wikipedia: Sandycove
MacLeod, Joyce's tower
Simon MacLeod, "Joyce's Tower", contemp

Martello towers — small defensive towers erected along the Irish coast during the Napoleonic invasion scares of the early 19th century. They were stone-built, 40 feet high, with eight foot thick walls, and the entrance door was usually ten or fifteen feet above the ground.

The Martello at Sandycove now houses the James Joyce Museum. Joyce spent six nights here in 1904. The opening scene of Ulysses – when "Stately, plump Buck Mulligan" appears in his yellow dressing gown "ungirdled" – is set upon the gun platform on its roof.

Wikipedia: Martello tower
Wikipedia: James Joyce Museum

Niall Naessens, Muglins
Niall Naessens, "The Muglins", contemporary.
Muglins
aerial view of the Muglins

the Muglins — an islet in Dublin Bay, about a third of a mile off Dalkey Island and about two miles offshore from the Forty Foot. The rock was a danger to shipping – there were thirteen wrecks in the area in the 1870s. A stone beacon was erected in 1880; an oil-gas light added in 1906. In 1914 the light's character was changed from "occulting" to "flashing" red every five seconds. It now flashes white with a range of 11 nautical miles.

"Little more than a rock to hold the light that told the rock's existence."

scotsman bay
sea wall at high tide
scotsman bay
sea wall at low tide

the sea-wall — a masonry embankment and pathway along the shore from Kingstown (now Dún Laoghaire) to Sandycove. In 1922 much of it was replaced by "Marine Parade" and the new shore road.

The wall features prominently in L.A.G Strong's novel, The Sea Wall:

"For him, the Wall was not the wall itself. That was just a promenade that people walked along, useful to him only at high tide, when, in certain conditions, he could fish from it. For him the Wall was that wilderness of rocks and bays and creeks and coves and patches of sand and beds of weed that lay below". – L.A.G. Strong, The Sea Wall, London: Gollancz 1933.