Pausing at Portmarnock

A bright, blustery day in November whipped me up on the DART to Portmarnock. A quick nosey at the station and off to the Velvet Strand trá for gasps of fresh winter air were the planned order of the day. 

Alas, this was not to be. The brutalist cement and steel manifestations of station furniture, none of it looking particularly convivial, greeted my arrival. “Oh, it’s one of those non-station stations”, I thought, disheartened.

Portmarnock Station facing north

The station as a stop on the original Dublin and Drogheda Railway line was opened in 1844. But any physical manifestation of Victorian architecture was not to be found. The gale-force bleakness of the day did little to quell my sense of fruitlessness, and so after wandering around the surrounding roads and carpark, the irony of signage for ‘Station House’ and ‘Station Manor’ bedecked upon new and under-construction residential estates when the station didn’t actually exist was not lost on me. The archetypal castellated stone walls of the GNRI are seemingly all that remains of any original station infrastructure. 

GNRI stone walls to north of car park.

After a determined hunched-against-the-freezing-wind-biting-my-nose-off walk along the strand – an absolute gem of a beach it has to be said – further investigation was required. Barry Carse’s image from the 1970s of a train pulling into Portmarnoack station is one of the best evidences of the original railway bridge and some of its Victorian buildings.

Barry Carse's photo of Portmarnock Station c.1970s. Source: Eiretrains

Ciarán Cooney on Eiretrains tells us that there were once wooden waiting rooms on both platforms but that these were removed in 2000 for upgrades to the DART service when it extended to Malahide. The edges of these can be seen in Carse’s photo.

A postcard found on the Historical Picture Archive website shows the platform with a train and its passengers. Zooming in, a large gas lamp and high railings can be seen, as can the low, original stone bridge as per Carse's photo.

Portmarnock Station top left image. Source: The Irish Historical Picture Company

Studies of earlier maps show the development of the line, running adjacent to Portmarnock House, the manor of the Plunkett family.

Historic Map 6 inch Colour (1837-1842)

6 inch Cassini 1830s

Historic Map 25 inch (1888-1913)

This seventeenth-century three-storey Anglo-Dutch style house stood until it was destroyed by fire in 1953. Historic maps show its ornamental gardens and approach roads which can still be traced in the present housing estate. 

Plunkett House. Source: North County Leader.

The Plunketts were an influential family obviously keen to demonstrate their status through architecture when they established the Portmarnock Brick & Terracotta Works in 1881. The high quality of these bricks and the Great Northern Railways’ obsession with brick-branding does leave me somewhat flummoxed as to why there is no evidence of there being an actual brick-built station or railway houses at Portmarnock. ‘The Kilns’ housing estate marks the location of the former brickworks.

Interior of a Portmarnock Brick. Source: Alan Costello.

Some social history for the station suggests that it was liable to overcrowding and poor management, especially on race days and during the summer. This was probably the result of a lack of facilities, such as a station, segregated waiting rooms, refreshment rooms, a station master’s house and nearby workers’ cottages, which demonstrates the importance of railway infrastructure. I’ll give two examples from newspaper archives.

Firstly in 1934, seventeen year old Lucy Keating of Lower Dominick Street, Dublin, lost her footing at the platform and fell between the carriages of a moving train, being crushed to death. Reportedly over 10,000 people had travelled to Portmarnock for the day, with ‘considerable overcrowding’ at the station until well after midnight.

The second is of another young girl, Annie Judd, aged eighteen who lived at the Quarry Cottages in Killester. These were looked at in the post Mystery of Killester, so it is interesting to see the resident and the rail connected. Annie sued the Great Northern Railway for injuries sustained at Portmarnock when she was “knocked down by a crowd when waiting in a passageway” at the station. She was awarded £150 in damages. Ireland’s compensation culture in action or a perfect example of the flawed design of Portmarnock station, or lack thereof?

I could simply conclude that the station only had platforms and waiting shelters, but I need to do a thorough investigation of the Irish Railway Record Society archives, which may produce some architectural drawings or site plans.

Two buildings I am interested in are to the west of the station platform. The buildings now lay in a heap of rubble: 

What lies beneath? The demolished building to the west of the station

The building to the west side of the plot is like an archaeological dig: the remains of the floorplan can be made out in the Google Earth satellite images:

Google Earth showing clear interior outline of floorplan.

What were these buildings? What were their rooms? The Digital Globe Map 2011-13 on Geohive.ie shows them intact, albeit with the eastern one semi-collapsed:

Digital Globe Map 2011-13 showing semi-collapsed eastern building to west of station.

Very confusing! Until someone can tell me what these buildings were, I won't be satisfied.

And so, for now, Portmarnock is on pause. If you have any information about the station, its buildings, or the buildings which stood to the west of it, please get in touch: irishrailarch@gmail.com or on Twitter: @IrishRailArch

Sources

Costello, Alan, Portmarnock and the Plunketts, 1850–1918: The Portmarnock Brick and Terracotta Works, Four Courts Press: Dublin, 2013.
Drogheda Independent 1884-current, Saturday, July 14, 1934; Page: 7
Eiretrains
Geohive.ie
Irish Historical Picture Archive
Irish Press 1931-1995, Tuesday, February 18, 1941; Page: 3
North County Leader
Roundtree, Susan, ‘Dublin Bricks and Brickmakers’, in Dublin Historical Record, Vol. 60, No. 1, Spring 2007, pp. 61-70.
UCD Historical Map collection
Visitportmarnock