Overview
This narrow strip of grass on Wolfe Tone Quay was once Croppies’ Hole: the pit where up to 300 United Irishmen, executed after the 1798 Rebellion, are said to have been thrown into a mass grave, some of their bodies first displayed on pikes as a warning. They were called Croppies for the short-cropped hair rebels wore in imitation of revolutionary France. The court martials happened just across the wall, at the Royal Barracks – now Collins Barracks – which still looms over the park.
For most of the 19th and early 20th centuries the ground was a flat exercise field for the soldiers in those barracks. It became a memorial only later: the Office of Public Works designated it the 1798 Memorial Park in 1997, and Taoiseach Bertie Ahern unveiled the dedication marker on 22 November 1998, the rebellion’s bicentenary. If you stop for one thing, read that marker – it carries the United Irish Catechism (‘What is that in your hand? A branch. Of what? Of the Tree of Liberty… Where did the seeds fall? In Ireland.’), lines from Seamus Heaney’s Requiem for the Croppies, and the words of Wolfe Tone.
The memorial and the doubt
The tall granite slab, cut with a cross and the date 1798, was raised in 1985 by soldiers of the Eastern Command of the Defence Forces, before the OPW formalised the park around it. There’s an honest caveat built into the place: archaeological surveys here have never confirmed any human remains, so whether this exact plot holds the dead, or where the boundaries of the grave lie, is unproven. It’s a memorial on a tradition, not a verified cemetery – which doesn’t lessen it, but is worth knowing. One small reward for looking closely: the dark grey limestone of the memorial is fossiliferous, studded with the remains of far older Carboniferous sea creatures.
A note on Anna Livia
The bronze Anna Livia – the reclining figure many people associate with this stretch of the quays – is not in Croppies’ Acre. She sits in a separate, smaller triangular park nearby, Croppies Memorial Park, cut off from the Acre by the Civil Defence headquarters. Commissioned for Dublin’s millennium in 1988, she stood on O’Connell Street until 2001, when she was removed to make way for the Spire, and was relocated here in 2011. It’s an easy walk between the two if you want both.
Visiting
The park was shut from 2012 to 2016 over anti-social behaviour, transferred from the OPW to Dublin City Council, and reopened after new paths and landscaping. Be realistic about it: it’s a city-centre green by a busy junction, and you may still see rough sleeping or drug use around the edges. By day it’s a fine, quiet spot for a riverside sandwich – reviewers who’ve felt uneasy mostly report being left alone – but it isn’t somewhere to linger after dark. Leashed dogs are welcome, the lawns and paths are flat and buggy-friendly, and there are no toilets on site (use Collins Barracks next door).
Getting there
It’s a transport-easy stop on the north quays. The Luas Red Line Museum stop is a minute or two away; Heuston Station is a few minutes’ walk across the river. Buses 145, 26, 79 and 79A stop on Wolfe Tone Quay, two minutes off. There’s no dedicated car park – the quayside has limited, time-restricted street parking, or use the Guinness Storehouse car park.
Nearby
The obvious pairing is right over the wall: the National Museum of Ireland – Decorative Arts & History at Collins Barracks, free to enter and genuinely good, holds the coat Michael Collins was wearing when he was killed. A few blocks north, Arbour Hill cemetery is the burial place of the executed leaders of the 1916 Rising. Give the Acre ten minutes and the marker a proper read, then spend the rest of the morning in the museum next door.