The changing Rampart scene in Dundalk over the years

Before the old railway embankment running down from the Hill Street Bridge to the Barrack Street Goods Depot disappeared at the beginning of the present century people living in the Marshes area of the Town used to say that the railway line divided Old Dundalk from the newer estates branching out from the Long Avenue.

To some extent this was true as Dundalk of a century ago was divided into three areas where houses were being built to accommodate people who were being moved out of the old central part of the Town --- Castletown; The Quay and Hill Street. These three areas had their own, distinct character and culture but then after World War Two when house building came, more or less to a standstill, new housing estates began to spring out all around the periphery of the Town. People from all three older areas and those who had come to settle in Dundalk began to mix together and new area relationships were established.

After the railway line was closed in 1995 and the old Redemptorist Hill was taken away, a new shape of Dundalk began to be established and, I believe, a new division of Dundalk was created, marked by the Rampart Stream.

The river or stream running down from Balmer's Bog to the Quays is itself old and nobody now can be sure exactly when it was cut away from the original Blackwater Stream behind the Pork Factory houses at the top of the Long Avenue but the best guess is that it was sometime about the beginning of the sixteenth century.

As I have explained on many occasions in these notes, the Rampart was not the stream but an embankment that formed part of the defences of the enclosed town from about that period. The stream has had many names over the past five hundred years from The Mill Stream to the Rampart Stream or, more recently, River.

Some people confuse the Stream with the Town Trench which flowed around the original walls in the form of a seawater moat which we know was dug out as a result of an order made in the reign of Edward IV made in 1492 to 'protect the Norman settlement from the Irish'. This idea is incorrect as there is no evidence that the two waters were ever connected and the Trench was probably filled in when the walled town was extended up to Dublin Street.

The situation was best described in an article written by the Canice O'Mahony, former Town Surveyor in his book 'An Engineer Remembers, published in 2008, in which he writes ---

'The division of this stream (the Blackwater) to follow as circuitous route on the south and east side of the medieval 'Newtown of Dundalk' served a number of very important purposes. Primarily intended to power a watermill at its eastern extremity, it would also provide a defensive feature against assaults from the south, it would be a convenient source of wholesome water for the inhabitants and removed a major obstacle to land reclamation.'

Canice, in this article, goes on to explain a legal dispute between the landowner Lord Roden and the newly established Dundalk Urban District Council in the early part of the last century.

This relates to the cleaning of the stream and the drainage of lands around it. The resulted in Lord Roden conveying his strip of property from Seatown to Ladywell to the Council who became owners of the Rampart River and Walk.

The Rampart Road, which now runs from Meadow Grove to the new Bóhtar Iarann at the Lidl Supermarket, has become an important relief roadway through the centre of Town from the County Council's Millennium Centre to Dublin Street.

The stream, in the meantime, has seen much of it course covered over and I have read that somebody is suggesting that the remaining stretch down to St. Alphonsus Road should also be piped underground.