Two-up two-down cottages built for cattle drovers, now the most self-consciously fashionable neighbourhood in the city and still, mostly, itself.
The name and the cattle
Bóthar na gCloch, the road of the stones — a paved routeway that ran west out of the medieval city, and one of the oldest roads in Dublin. It was the drovers’ road: cattle came down it to the market at Smithfield, which was the largest livestock market in the country until it closed in the 2000s.
The terraced cottages that define the area were built in the late nineteenth century by the Dublin Artisans’ Dwellings Company for working families, and the street names — Oxmantown, Viking Road, Sitric Road, Olaf Road — are a nod to this having been the Norse settlement outside the walls after the Normans took the city.
What it is now
The most changed neighbourhood in Dublin over the last decade, and the one most argued about. Cottages that were working-class housing within living memory now sell for sums that make the newspapers. There is a lot of good coffee. There is a widely mocked amount of it.
What has kept it from tipping over entirely is that a substantial part of the original community is still there, the pubs have not all been refitted, and the scale is unchanged — nobody has knocked the cottages down.
Walking it
Manor Street and Stoneybatter proper for the shops and the cafés.
Oxmantown Road and the streets off it for the cottages, which are painted individually and are the reason the neighbourhood photographs well.
Arbour Hill — a small cemetery behind the church where the executed leaders of 1916 are buried in a mass grave, with the Proclamation carved on the wall in Irish and English. It is free, it is almost always empty, and it is more affecting than anywhere else in the city that deals with the same subject.
Smithfield Square, a vast cobbled expanse with the old distillery chimney, a cinema and a monthly horse fair that is a genuinely unusual thing to stumble into.
Eating and drinking
Mulligan’s Grocer and Walsh’s on Stoneybatter for proper pubs — Walsh’s has a snug and a trad session.
The Cobblestone in Smithfield, five minutes away, for the music.
L. Mulligan Grocer, Grano, and a run of small restaurants on Manor Street.
The Lilliput Press, an independent publisher with a bookshop on Sitric Road.
Why come
It is fifteen minutes from the centre and it is a completely different city: low, quiet, residential, and with the Phoenix Park at the end of the street. If you have three days in Dublin, an afternoon here and in the park is a better use of one of them than a second cathedral.
More Neighbourhoods
Temple Bar
Cobbled lanes, a serious cultural quarter, and the most expensive pints in Ireland. Worth an hour in daylight and worth understanding before you spend an evening in it.
The Liberties
The oldest surviving neighbourhood in Dublin, outside the medieval walls and outside the city's jurisdiction, now full of distilleries again after a century without them.