A wild park built on a rubbish dump
Irishtown Nature Reserve is a strip of reclaimed wilderness on the Poolbeg peninsula, about 6km from the centre of Dublin, where a path runs along the edge of Sandymount Strand with the whole sweep of Dublin Bay in front of you – on a clear day from Dún Laoghaire round to Howth Head. The genuinely interesting thing about it: barely fifty years ago this was a heap of building rubble. If you only do one thing here, keep walking – the path links to the Great South Wall, and you can carry on out to the Poolbeg Lighthouse if the legs are up to it.
From dump to nature reserve
During a short building boom between 1972 and 1975, construction rubble and household waste were tipped here on a grand scale. Turning that mound into a park struck most people as far-fetched, and when the Sandymount and Merrion Residents Association put the idea to the old Dublin Corporation in the mid-1970s, scepticism won the room. They persisted. Through the 1980s the Corporation and local volunteers cleared and shaped the ground, sowed grasses and planted trees, and let nature do the rest; the park was established around 1987.
There’s an odd second layer underfoot. During the early-1980s Wood Quay excavations in the city – one of the most contested archaeological digs in Irish history – up to 30 lorry loads of potentially significant rubble were dumped here. None of it is on show, but the ground itself holds fragments of medieval Dublin.
Birds, foxes and 200 plants
For a man-made patch of former landfill, the reserve has done well: over 200 plant species have taken hold across its grassland and scrub. Birdwatchers come for skylarks, linnets, dunnocks, stonechats, wrens and herons, and in winter for the brent geese that graze the nearby grass and mudflats. More than one walker has been surprised by a fox. In spring and summer the rougher grass turns up wildflowers – lucerne, melilot, broad-leaved everlasting pea among them – if you know what you’re looking at.
The honest part: the smell
This is not a pristine wilderness, and it’s worth knowing why before you go. The reserve sits cheek by jowl with Dublin’s main wastewater treatment works and the Poolbeg incinerator, and on the wrong day, with the wind in the wrong direction, there’s a definite whiff. A high embankment screens the green strip from the industry along most of the route, which is partly why it feels as wild as it does, but the smell is the price of admission. Most visitors decide it’s well worth it: few people come here, and that emptiness is much of the appeal.
Walking out to Poolbeg
From the reserve the path connects to the Great South Wall, the 18th-century sea wall that runs roughly a mile out into Dublin Bay to the red Poolbeg Lighthouse at its tip. It’s a fine, exposed walk with the Poolbeg Chimneys looming behind you and big views of the harbour mouth; reckon on around three hours there and back from the park at a brisk pace, longer if you stop for the birds.
Visiting
- Entrances: there are two. One is an off-road path on Beach Road, opposite Marine Drive, which runs about 1.4km along the edge of Sandymount Strand to the park. The other is on Pigeon House Road, near the Poolbeg generating station.
- Cost and hours: free, open daily from dawn to dusk.
- Accessibility: the main paths are flat and firm with only gentle inclines, and there are benches along the way, so they suit buggies and wheelchairs. There are no toilets on site.
- Dogs: welcome, and many are let off the lead; during the bird-nesting season keep them close to avoid disturbing ground-nesting birds.
- Getting there: it’s an easy trip from Ringsend or Sandymount; the nearest DART station is Sandymount, around a half-hour walk along the strand. There’s no car park at the reserve itself, though there’s street parking nearby and the Shelley Banks car park further out the peninsula.
- Nearby: Sandymount Strand for a long beach walk at low tide, and the Great South Wall and Poolbeg Lighthouse for the full coastal version.