A siege, a civil war and a castle met on this corner

A battlefield and a siege framed this busy corner

You are standing on South Great George's Street, at the corner where Stephen Street Lower, Coppinger Row and Golden Lane all converge, in the shadow of the Dunnes Stores at Castleview, barely twenty metres from where you're standing. The street itself has worn several names and several trades over the centuries, but the buildings crowding this junction now are recent arrivals — a Premier Inn dating only to, Kellys Hotel & Bar, and The Coach House filling in what was, for a long time, a much scruffier corner of the city.

A short block from here, the ground itself was a battlefield. The Battle of Dublin, the week of street fighting in 1922 that opened the Irish Civil War, spread through this quarter as Provisional Government forces moved against anti-Treaty positions in the city centre. Fighting of this kind rarely respected the tidy lines the retrieved facts draw — the guns that opened the Civil War were audible, if not visible, from this exact spot.

Three centuries earlier, this same patch of ground sat within reach of the Siege of Dublin, the failed 1649 attempt by Irish Royalist and Confederate forces to take the city from Michael Jones's English garrison — an assault abandoned after the decisive defeat at the Battle of Rathmines. The city that soldiers fought over then had Dublin Castle as its prize, and the castle still dominates the ground within a hundred and fifty metres of where you stand.

Closer to hand, and gentler, is the Garda Museum and its adjoining Garda Memorial Garden, a sculpture-marked remembrance to Ireland's police force tucked in near the castle grounds. Aungier Street runs south from this junction, its terraces — numbers 78, 79, 80 — carrying protected status as part of Dublin's historic commercial fabric, ordinary shopfronts with listed status behind them.

Dublin Castle and a vanished black pool stand nearby

Two streets north, Dublin Castle has held the site since the reign of King John — a motte-and-bailey stronghold chosen for the highest ground in the old city, rebuilt from the late 17th century into the Georgian palace visitors see today. Within its walls, the Ship Street Barracks once stood at the edge of a pool created by the River Poddle — the "dubh linn," the black pool, that gave the city its name. The Chapel Royal inside the castle served as the official chapel for the Lord Lieutenant's household until 1922, then sat unused for decades before reconsecration as a Catholic church in 1943.

Older still, and mostly vanished, is the Church of St Michael le Pole, a pre-Norse ecclesiastical settlement believed to date as far back as the 7th century, once standing between Ship Street and Golden Lane. Golden Lane itself has carried that name only since the Goldsmiths' Guild moved there in 1812 — before that it was Cross Lane, marked on Speed's 1610 map of the city.

A few minutes' walk east, The George, Dublin on South Great George's Street stands as one of Ireland's oldest and best-known gay bars, on a street with a long history as a gathering point for Dublin's gay community. Nearby, the Stag's Head on Dame Court has held a pub license since 1770, its Victorian interior and mosaic pavement surviving rebuilding in 1895. City Hall, built 1769–79 as the Royal Exchange, and the Chester Beatty Library within the castle grounds, round out a short walk thick with civic and cultural history.

Ancient limestone bedrock carries the weight of the city

Underneath all of this — the castle, the pubs, the tram-worn stone of George's Street — lies Dinantian limestone laid down over 300 million years ago, the same Carboniferous bedrock that underlies much of central Dublin and gave the city's early builders their stone. It is not a landscape that announces itself at street level, but it is the reason the ground here has held so much weight, stone upon stone, for so long — a castle, a chapel, a black pool long since built over, and a corner shop on the site of a battlefield.