Deilginis · Co. Dublin
Where Dublin's celebrities live, but everyone's welcome on the train.
Dalkey is what Dublin would look like if Dublin had won the lottery and decided not to tell anyone. The DART pulls in beside the granite station, you walk five minutes uphill, and you are on Castle Street with two genuine medieval castles, a tenth-century church and an Italian deli all on the same block. The houses behind the village are some of the most expensive in Ireland. Bono is up the road. Enya has the literal castle. Van Morrison passes through. Nobody points.
It was not always pretty. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when the Liffey silted and big ships could not get up to Dublin, Dalkey was the city's working harbour. The Crown granted unloading rights in 1358 and the Dublin merchants put up seven defended castles to keep the wool, wine and grain safe from the O'Byrnes and O'Tooles raiding down out of Wicklow. The Black Death came ashore here. So did most of the medieval kingdom's imports. The village then is the village now: the same stone, the same street, a different sort of cargo.
Come for an afternoon. Walk the village, take the ferry to the island if the wind is in, climb Killiney Hill for the view that put the Vico Road on every postcard, eat lobster at the Duck or a chowder at Finnegan's, get the DART home. Or stay the night and skip Dublin entirely. Dalkey would prefer the second.
