The other week, on a bright, slightly chilly autumn afternoon, I cycled down to the Pigeon House to take a look around this strange outgrowth of land that’s located right in the geographical centre of Dublin. The chimneys of its now defunct electricity generating station are visible from almost everywhere in Dublin, yet I know very little about the area, and I don’t think I’ve ever travelled the full length of the peninsula, which continues past the generating station, reaching a granite sea wall that leads all the way out to the Poolbeg lighthouse.
When you get to the Pigeon House Road, a road that seems to lead nowhere, you see a bank of containers in a commercial shipping yard to your left, and a tall barrier shielding the site to your right. Behind this barrier is the bulldozed site of the Irish Glass Bottle Factory, one of the most controversial property purchases made during Ireland’s boom. Intended as a mixed-use, high-rise mini Manhattan, it’s now little more than a muddy field churned up by heavy machinery.
I went straight ahead at the end of the road, which I learned is not the way to go: it leads to a dead end, where railings and gates block your path towards the grassy wastelands that border the south side of the peninsula.
I returned the way I had come, then turned right, past the entrance to the container yard, where juggernauts were queuing up to deposit their loads. Cycling along this road, you’re immediately assailed by the smell of sewage, which has been processed and expelled on this site for about a century. As you can imagine, the stench is pretty disgusting. Nevertheless, I stopped to take a photo of the canal of effluent that emerges from under the road, then runs parallel to it before joining the Liffey just before it reaches the generating station. Opposite me at this point was the site of the Poolbeg waste incinerator, another oddly-located site of controversy on this peculiar outcrop.
Canal of stench
Poolbeg incinerator site
Straight ahead, the looming towers of the Pigeon House, and in front of them a large redbrick building dating from 1902: the first electricity generating station in Dublin. James Joyce mentions it in Ulysses (set in 1904):
‘the flags of the Ballast office and Custom House were dipped in salute as were also those of the electrical power station at the Pigeonhouse, and the Poolbeg light.’
Generating station (1902 station in foreground)
A large granite building next to the generating station was built as a hotel in the late 18th century, then converted into barracks soon after the 1798 rebellion, when British troops were stationed there. Essentially this tip of the peninsula remained military property for around a hundred years, after which it was sold to the corporation and used for electricity generation, feeding the substation in Fleet Street in central Dublin.
Cycling past the gates to the Pigeon House, you come across an incongruous line of cannon, which obviously reference the site’s military history. Taking a sharp right turn down a narrow roadway, you emerge at a wide stretch of sand dune, providing a view of the south county and the Dublin mountains.
Continuing on along the road, you pass the generating station, then reach the sea wall, a mile-long construction that was built in the eighteenth century as a means of clearing the mouth of the Liffey of the sand and silt that had made it such a danger to shipping. At the end of the wall, the Poolbeg lighthouse was built (it became operational in 1767).
As I walked along the rough granite of the sea wall, I watched the activity in the surprisingly busy shipping lane, as passenger ferries and container traffic came and went. I thought of how, when in the centre of the city, you never thought about Dublin as a port – you carried on oblivious to the continual traffic just a couple of miles down the river.
The Pigeon House area is an intriguing place, full of surprises and traces of Dublin’s industrial and civic past. It also smells, really badly.
