Irish Varieties

Two chapters of nineteenth-century writing on the history, anecdotes and local lore of the south side of County Dublin, gathered here as Irish Varieties. The Kingdom of Dalkey recalls the convivial society of Dublin wits that, in the 1790s, crowned a mock "King of Dalkey, Emperor of the Muglins" and held an annual summer coronation on Dalkey Island, complete with processions, odes, sermons and a satirical Dalkey Gazette. The chapter reprints many of these pieces, draws on the recollections of contemporaries including Thomas Moore, and shows how the revels carried a sharp political edge in the years before the 1798 rebellion, when they came to an end.

Shanganagh traces the history of the district between Killiney and Bray from the Norman grant to the Lawless family, and describes the antiquities of the area, including the cromlech at Glen Druid, the old churches of Tullagh and Rathmichael, Puck's Castle, and local customs and beliefs about fairies.

The Kingdom of Dalkey is also the subject of a chapter in Ireland Sixty Years Ago by John Edward Walsh, which describes the same mock court more briefly, and the district around Shanganagh, Dalkey and Killiney is covered at length in An Irishman's Diary on the Neighbourhood of Dublin, elsewhere in this library.