Recognition awarded to those who had served with the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, issued at the time of their disbanding.
While much has been written about the attempts by the Irish Citizen Army to dig trenches in St. Stephen’s Green during the Easter Rising, another series of WWI era Dublin trenches have been largely forgotten. According to one website dedicated to the memory of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers:
The 6th and 7th Dublins were stationed at the Curragh and later at The Royal (Collins) Barracks in Dublin. They trained in trench warfare in the Phoenix Park. Today, there is an outline of one of the trenches in the Park, as a dip in the land running east/west in front of the Papal Cross.
Kevin Myers has written about the trenches in the park in the pages of The Irish Times, noting that:
In the broad green acres of Phoenix Park across the road from Aras an Uachtarain, one can see strange undulations and surface scars beneath the grass. Soon those undulations will vanish as the summer returns, and one might even believe that the scars do not exist and whatever happened to the earth is now gone, past, extinct.
One user on the dublin.ie forum has pinpointed the area they believe to be the location of the trenches, which is inkeeping with the claim on the specialist website quoted above. Below I have shown the same area in Google Maps.
Google Earth View of area.
Are there visible remains to be seen in the two aerial images above of WWI training trenches? I’m not entirely sure. I’d rather doubt it, giving the form of the lines. One comment below notes “They’re on Chesterfield Avenue across from the main road running parallel to the visitors centre”.
Area around Visitor Centre
Damian Sheils, who has done research in this field and is a conflict archaeologist has noted that it is unclear just where the Phoenix Park trenches were, but that:
Trenches were constructed in places like the Phoenix Park, Finner Camp (Donegal), Kilworth Camp (Cork) and the Curragh. The latter survive in incredible condition and look like a section of the Western Front. One account of a soldier from the Leinsters described in a letter home that these training trenches were ‘not the simple holes in the ground you might imagine.’ It is past time the Phoenix Park ones were firmly pinned down and explored- an ideal project for the decade of commemorations I think.
I’d welcome more information on these trenches as I’m very curious now.
Click on the book for more.
Click on the book for more.
Donal
Ciarán
Sam
Come Here To Me! 
I would imagine that those lines are not representative of Trenches. As they are straight. Real trenches are staggered and zigzagged to prevent ease of movement during break in. A good example of this can be found in the Curragh of Kildare. The link attached shows in the centre and to the left of the picture two sets of trench works dug during the period of the first world war.
Their on chesterfield avenue across from the main road running parallel to the visitors centre. The army in ww1 practised their trench digging there
Also on chesterfield avenue across from the aras is a stone marker and almost beside it is a cross cut into the grass filled with small white stones that mark the spot where cavendish and Burke were murdered by the invincibles
Hi Donal,
I have looked at a lot of these images from the Park as well and it is not immediately clear where the trenches were. They were most certainly there though, and a geophysical survey would do much to identify the nature of them. Unfortunately we have not yet grasped in Ireland that such features reveal much about how men were trained going to the front in WW1. They are regularly subjected to archaeological investigation in the UK and it reveals a lot of info about things such as longevity (and date) of use and subjection to live fire etc. Trenches were constructed in places like the Phoenix Park, Finner Camp (Donegal), Kilworth Camp (Cork) and the Curragh. The latter survive in incredible condition and look like a section of the Western Front. One account of a soldier from the Leinsters described in a letter home that these training trenches were ‘not the simple holes in the ground you might imagine.’ It is past time the Phoenix Park ones were firmly pinned down and explored- an ideal project for the decade of commemorations I think.
I lived in slough in Berkshire up to the nineteenth nineties on slough trading estate in ww1 and after thousands of military vehicles were stored even in the late nineteenth eighties there the remainins of lories .armour cars ambulances
With a large red cross on the side of the lorrie. We’re still there they might still lay under the new industrial buildings today .PS ask your older relatives who lived and worked in slough from the nineteen fifties till the present. And also on that estate are other relics of ww1 and ww2 like a pilbox at the junction of
Weston road.and Buckingham avenue next to heathfields factory and then at the old Ford motor company plant Sutton lane Langley they production of spitfire aircraft and on the other side of the road a landing field with remains of
A hangar a restroom for service personnel check that out
You can find the trenches alongside the Acres Road (on the magazine fort side of the road) you’ll need a dry summer and freshly cut grass to see them on Google earth. A good example is beneath the Dynamo Dublin pitches in the park – just over 200m North from the edge of the Dynamo Dublin carpark. They’re particularly good examples, with communication trenches between multiple lines of ‘zig zag’ fighting trenches and saps. I’ve also seen some faint traces just south of the papal cross and I seem to remember some west of St.Mary’s. I wonder if the trenches included mock ‘bunkers’