Rush
peninsula of the yew trees; Joyce agrees, noting the village sits on land three-quarters surrounded by sea
A seaside town between Skerries and Lusk, once called the market garden of Ireland. In the 18th century it was notorious for smuggling; a traveller in 1744 found the men all employed in fishing and smuggling, and it was home to the smuggler Jack Connor and birthplace of the privateer Luke Ryan, said to have sailed for the French. On the Drumanagh headland is a large promontory fort where rare Roman-era artefacts have been found.
Flint tools, a passage grave and a cist point to Neolithic settlement. The Drumanagh promontory fort has yielded Roman coins, brooches and ingots; a 1996 newspaper claim of a Roman coastal fort is disputed by many archaeologists, who see the finds as evidence of trade, and the council bought the site in 2016. The ruins of St Maur's chapel at Whitestown date from Anglo-Norman times, with a legend of French sailors who vowed a chapel to the saint if they survived a storm. In medieval times Rush was a manor of the Earl of Ormond, and in 1744 a traveller described mud-and-straw houses holding three to four hundred people.
A penal-era Catholic church was built in 1776 and now houses the library, and two Martello towers went up in 1804 against Napoleon. Kenure House passed from the Ormondes to the Echlins in 1714 and later to the Palmers, who sold the estate to the Land Commission in 1964; it featured in several 1960s films and was demolished in 1978, though local protest saved the portico. On 29 April 1920 the IRA attacked the RIC barracks, killing a policeman, and in November that year the IRA officer Jack McCann was taken from a house in Rush and shot by the Black and Tans.
Drawn from the History section of the Wikipedia article on Rush ↗, rewritten here and adding nothing it does not say; licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.
Straight-line distances from the town centre, from each site's documented coordinates.
- Clontarf · Good Friday 1014: Brian Boru's forces break Leinster and Dublin's Vikings — and Brian is killed praying in his tent. Now a quiet seafront suburb.
- Drumanagh promontory fort · A headland fort that has yielded Roman coins, brooches and pottery — the strongest evidence of a Roman trading post (or a Romanised Irish king) in Ireland.
All of these are pinned on the Hidden Ireland map.
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