A dolmen in the housing estate
The oldest thing in Ballybrack stands not in a field but in the middle of a council estate. The Ballybrack Dolmen, better known as the Shanganagh Cromlech, is a Neolithic portal tomb of roughly 2500 BC, set in a sunken green at Cromlech Fields in Hackettsland. Its capstone runs about 7 feet by 6 feet and weighs an estimated 12 tons, propped on portal stones a little over a metre high. It has outlasted four and a half thousand years partly because the stones were too heavy for anyone to shift, and the houses simply grew up around it. There is barely any signage. You walk in off the street and there it is, treated as part of the landscaping.
If you have twenty minutes in Ballybrack, this is the thing to see. It is one of the few megalithic monuments left standing inside the Dublin urban area.
The village and its name
In Irish the place is An Baile Breac, ‘the speckled townland’, and it appears on John Rocque’s 1760 map as ‘Bally Brack’, well before the railway turned it into a commuter suburb. The coastal line reached the area in the mid-19th century and set off a wave of villa-building; the original Ballybrack station closed in 1863 when a replacement opened just to the south, and its building survives today as a private house. The stop that lasted was Killiney and Ballybrack station, shortened to plain Killiney in 1921.
The electoral division counted 2,872 people in the 2022 census. This is a place people live rather than visit, and it is honest to say so: around the small village centre you will find a post office, a newsagent, two pubs, a few barbers and a café, but nothing that warrants a special trip on its own.
Who lived here
Michael Davitt, founder of the Land League, settled in Ballybrack after he married Mary Yore in 1886. The cottage the Land League gave the couple was, by his own account, the only gift Davitt ever accepted from his admirers, and it became known as Land League Cottage. Seán Lemass, Taoiseach from 1959 to 1966, was born and raised in the area. Paul Howard, who created Ross O’Carroll-Kelly, grew up here too and went on to mine the south Dublin childhood for a long-running satire of exactly that world.
Killiney Hill and the parks
A short walk north brings you to Killiney Hill Park, with its trails and the wide view over Dublin Bay to the Wicklow Mountains. Closer to the village, Kilbogget Park has open grass and a children’s playground on the ground between Ballybrack and Cabinteely. Ballybrack FC, formed in 1975 as KBY FC and now with more than 300 children on its books, plays out of Coolevin.
The parish church, SS Alphonsus and Columba, went up in 1856 on an exposed slope of Killiney Hill; the parish was constituted in 1863, and the newer Church of the Apostles at Willow Vale opened in 1982.
Getting there
The DART is the easiest way in: Killiney station is about a twelve-minute walk from the village, with frequent trains north to the city and south to Bray. Buses 7, 45 and 111 connect to the city centre and Dún Laoghaire. The Tesco at Ballybrack Shopping Centre stays open until 10pm most nights if you need supplies.
Time a visit around the hill: the dolmen first thing, then up Killiney Hill for the bay views, and you have seen the best of Ballybrack before lunch.