The history of development on the Rampart Road in Dundalk

If you were a stranger coming into Dundalk of the present day and to ask 'Where is the Rampart?', I would be willing to bet that most residents of the Town would reply that it was the stream which runs from Ladywell down to Mill Street. Some, however, might say that it is the road that runs from St. Alphonsus Road to the shopping centres beside Avenue Road.

Both of these answers, of course, would be essentially correct but neither would fully explain the original meaning of the name! You see the origins of the 'Rampart' was that it was neither a river nor a road but part of the eastern defences of the Town from about the end of the 13th century.

It was a raised mound of earth that ran from the old walled town up to the southern approaches to the town that probably had water ditches on either side of it. In that sense the only part of the present Rampart Road which corresponds to the original 'Rampart' is a short stretch between about the back of the Imperial Hotel to the Tesco Extra store.

The rest is just the remains of a path that ran along the old Mill Stream that was created as a diversion from the Blackwater Stream to the Castletown Estuary at Quay Street to drive a water mill somewhere about the Quay Street end of Mill Street. How it came to be regarded as a roadway is because people from Dundalk would stroll along the top of the mound or rampart.

The origins of 'Rampart River' is very well explained in the late Canice O'Mahony's excellent book, first published in 2008 'An Engineer Remembers'. Canice, who had a great sense of the important of local history, once told me that when the idea of turning the old Rampart cinder path into a roadway that would link the Barrack Street Railway Goods Yard with the main road south out of the Town, the local engineers had realised that it might, eventually, become one of the most import parts of the road infrastructure of the Town. However, even Canice himself might not have fully envisaged just how important that link might be since his own death back in 2014!

This thought has come to me as a result of the loud bangings that can be heard all over the Town in recent weeks, due to the pile-driving that has been started for the new apartments beside the Ramparts Shopping Centre.

Some people who have heard the noise seem to think that it is the largest such foundation work that had been undertaken in Dundalk in over fifty years but I am not so sure that is correct as I can recall many other 'pile-driving' engineer works in various parts of the Town during that period.

Canice's article points out that --- 'In his research into the topography of the town, published under the title “Dundelca to Dundalk”, Paul Gosling, (himself a native of the Hill Street area), concluded that the artificial water course along the route of the present Rampart River was constructed in the later decades of the 16th century. Prior to that, the natural drainage of the low lying lands in the South West Upper End, including Balmer's Bog, drained in an easterly direction via the meandering Blackwater Stream'.

The interesting point about this observation is that many people who now live in the 'Marshes' area, and may even have grown up in the district, do not seem to know the exact course of the old Blackwater through their part of Dundalk.

The reason for this is that much of the courses of both the Blackwater and the Rampart steams have been piped underground and the drainage of the entire area has also been affected by the various housing schemes that have been built over it.

If you examine the ground closely, however, you can spot where a considerable volume of water once flowed over the townlands of Marshes Lower and Marsh South, and into Dundalk Bay through the other Rampart Wall built in the eighteenth century, as the Sea Rampart between Soldiers Point and the Loakers, that defends the present Town area from flooding.

The implications of all this is that the present drainage system may not be adequate to prevent much of town which has been built in a flood plain from flooding in the event of rising sea levels, due to Climate Change; nor even from flood waters created by increasingly heavy rain storms.

It is surprising how many people are becoming more and more aware of these threats and it is to be hoped that the local authorities are prepared to do something about this in the coming decades and that funding promised by the national government becomes available.

Otherwise Dundalk my well end up as the 'Venice of the Irish Sea' by the middle of the present century!