Come Here To Me!

Between Lower Bridge Street and Winetavern Street, four alleyways used to extend from Merchants Quay to Cook Street,  now only one, Skippers Alley, can be traced today in the modern landscape.

From 1798:

Lower Bridge St.

|Swan Alley| |Skippers Alley| |Chapel Yard| |Rosemary Lane|                 

Winetavern St.

1798

Things looked the same in the middle of the 19th century, though the Chapel Yard has been renamed Adam & Eve (after the tavern and then church situated there):

1836

Today, only one of those four remains – Skippers Alley and it can be seen on Google Maps (just before the ‘M’ in Merchants Quay) It’s quite unusual that Google Maps included such as nondescrript lane, they usually don’t.

The (locked?) entrance to Skippers Alley from Cook Street:

The view from the Merchant Quay side. It doesn’t look like much of an alley anymore:

Rosemary Lane used to be a continuation of St. Michael’s lane. What ever happened to it? I’m not sure. No doubt it was redeveloped at some point. A little bit on its history:

A passage extending from the north-eastern side of Cook-street to the Merchants’ Quay, is styled in a lease of 1403 “Lovestokes-lane,” a name subsequently changed into “Longstick-lane,” and “Woodstock-lane;” but from the early part of the 17th century this locality has been generally known as “Rosemary-lane.” The “Golden Lion” is noticed in Rosemary-lane in the reigu of James I., and in the middle of the last century there was standing in this lane part of the wall of an old cagework house, over the door of which, cut in timber, were two escutcheons, and between them the date of 1600 (J.T. Gilbert, A History Of The City of Dublin, 1861)