'St Bridget’s Terrace in Dundalk now has all the kudos of London’s Brick Lane'

Dundalk Library has a wonderful archive of old maps. I’ve just been looking through ledgers of linen backed manuscripts dating back to 1735.

Maps by Taylor and Skinner; and Matthew Wren, ‘names’ in the mapping world before the standardising of all maps by the Ordnance Survey in about 1835.

Then I got side tracked by a ledger of estate maps from 1887 and a page in the register for Cornamucklagh.

The townland that sits behind Davys Bar on the border side of Omeath. The rent for 4acres, 2roods, 2perches was £5.15 shillings. (I know land in Cornamucklagh; its not Drumiskin.) How was it ever paid?

Yet many of the names in the register are familiar to me today. The six inch Ordnance Survey of 1875 is the first record of the railway, its imprint on the paper landscape hugely impressive.

Sweeps of lines to the present Dundalk station with even more lines depicting the activity at the Barrick Street Goods Yard --- where the Swimming Pool is now.

Then the most impressive ‘bridge’ out over the harbour; and railway line running east to Greenore. I simply had to search out a photograph of the ‘First Metals’ as the railway bridge over the Castletown River was known.

All the commerce of Seatown is documented on the 1965 map; and a lot of the social life. I note Churches, Meeting Rooms, Masonic Hall, Free Library------

But maps only tell me so much. They tell me St. Bridget’s Terrace runs from Mary Street to Castle Road and that the houses were standard two up and two down.

What the maps don’t tell me is that you stepped from the street into a kitchen with a parlour behind that. From the kitchen open stairs give access to two bedrooms above. And at various times one of the houses in the street utilised the front part of the kitchen into a shop.

The street was teeming with children at play.

A rope suspended from the pole round the corner at St. Patricks Terrace provided the girls with a swing. Boys played marbles. Rounders’ were popular as was cricket -- played against the gable of the Mary Street corner house.

Why cricket? I wondered. And then I saw a cricket pitch on one of the old Seatown maps. The Dundalk Feis played a big role in the streets ‘games’.

St. Bridget’s Terrace had their own corresponding feis. Singing, dancing, poetry judged by a couple of senior girls.
A responsibility they performed with stern dignity. Occasionally their over exuberance was more scathing than their counterparts in the Town Hall.

Running a message was part of every childs street life. And not only hard goods. A message was a fore runner of todays text. Often it took the form; ‘Heres a halfpenny run round and tell Mrs Maguire ---- I don’t know where Mrs Maguire lives -- well here’s a penny – all right then; what will I tell her’!

A number of the men in the street worked ‘digging coal’ out of the boats in the docks. Their children, accompanied by neighbouring children brought them their ‘tea’. Running across Castle Road through the allotments to the docks.

Tommy Traynor was born in the street and on his summer visits home while playing professional football for Southampton, wasn’t above joining in with children kicking a ball.

Peter Rice was raised on the corner of Castle Road and Brendan O’Dowda on the Point Road; his sister owned McManus’s Bar.

All three (internationals) footballer; engineer; and singer would have walked St. Bridget’s Terrace at the same time. As would huge Clydesdale horses drawing wagons from the railway yard to the linen factory at the top of the street.

St. Patricks Cathedral was the streets parish church and I was told by one of Dundalk Towns most loyal football supporters that one Saturday night having just completed his act of contrition in the confessional, the priest himself a staunch Dundalk supporter leant forward and quietly said ‘how did Dundalk do today. They were beaten three one Father’, my informant duly replied.
To find as he opened the confession box door and confronted by the further queue of penitents; the priests voice followed him with. ‘That’s the worst I ever heard’!

St Bridget’s Terrace now has all the kudos of London’s Brick Lane and I note that while my map of Dundalk shows the street it doesn’t have the street name --- the one name I should have put on.