The area around the Grand Canal Theatre (I refuse to call it anything else, sorry Bord Gáis) is largely speaking unknown territory to me with regards the history of the city. Recently I was taken aback by a street sign informing me I was standing at ‘Misery Hill’, a name that seems totally at odds with the fashionable area around the theatre today. In a time before theatre and cappuccinos the area looked rather different indeed, and one writer in the Freeman’s Journal in 1920 wrote:
How many Dubliners know Misery Hill? The name itself is a stroke of genius,whoever invented it, and the bare thoroughfare, running between grimy walls, over which peer huge gasometers, with in the distance orange plums of acrid smoke drifting from the chimneys of a chemical factory, shows that Dublin, when it sets itself to it, can outrival Wigan!
Misery Hill Is Closed. (Image by William Murphy: https://www.flickr.com/photos/infomatique/4446399832 )
Paul Clerkin’s wonderful little book Dublin Street Names (Published in 2001 by Gill and Macmillan and right up the street of a lot of CHTM readers I imagine) gives good insight into this bizarre name, noting that “in the early 13th century, there was a leper hospital close to the junction of modern Townsend Street and Hawkins Street. Sufferers who were unable to gain entrance to the hospital would spend the night at Misery Hill, well away from the town and its citizens.”
The inimitable Éamonn Mac Thomáis spoke about Misery Hill in a paper for the Old Dublin Society in the late 1960s, and like Clerkin points to the historic leper hospital, stating that “it was sometimes referred to as Lazor Hill, Lazy Hill, Lazars Hill and Lepers Hill.” He also states however that another possible meaning for the name comes from the fact that those executed on Gallow’s Hill (“a common place for execution”) often had their bodies taken here, where morbidly enough “they were left hanging in chains for a period of six months to a year.” The example Mac Thomáis provided were two pirates name Gidley and McKinley, whose bodies were hung up here in 1766.
Google Maps showing the location of Misery Hill in Dublin’s docklands.
An interesting short history of leprosy in Ireland, mentioning Misery Hill, has appeared on the Facebook page Wistorical and can be read here, and it includes a lot of interesting detail on the history of the disease in Dublin.
A historic street sign for Misery Hill pops up briefly in this video of Ronnie Drew performing Ratcliffe Highway, at 00:56. This is a great video I’d not seen before, and my thanks to Shane Fitzgerald for pointing it out to us on Facebook.
A nice little nod to the streetname comes from Dublin band Tujacques, who in December 2013 used the street sign for an EP cover. That the title of a previous EP was Obedientia Civium Urbis Felicitas (the somewhat ironic city motto of Dublin, implying that obedient citizens make for a happy city) makes us think they’ve a soft spot for the history of Dublin too!
Click on the book for more.
Click on the book for more.
Donal
Ciarán
Sam
Misery Hill from An Post delivery HQ, 2009
I did a post a week or so as I was also surprised to see the name of the street…
http://wp.me/p1rj8z-4cP
Misery indeed! In Cork we have (or had) some corkers (excuse the pun) too, such as Hang Dog (Tramore) Road, Knocker’s Hole (Dominic Street) and Dead Woman’s Hill (Blackrock Rd). These were all sanitised during the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries but live on in memory. Thanks for the post!
In relation to leprosy, Cork’s ‘Leper’s Walk’ on the northside was converted to ‘Lover’s Walk’ when the area was transformed into fashionable Montenotte in the early C19th. Clerkin’s book is indeed a great resource and one of the sources for my book ‘Layers’ which covers Cork streetnames and history.
The name of Townsend Street in Irish is Cnoc na Lobhair (the hill of the lepers) and the story in the local oral tradition is that those hose disease had progressed tohe point where death was inevitable were walked down Misery Hill to ships to take them to a peer colony off the coast of Africa
Another story was that it was on misery hill that lepers and the infirm would wait until the weather was favourable enough for ships travelling to Santiago De Compostela where they hoped they might be cured.
Misery Hill featured in The Committments at the very end when the famous U.S. soul star apparantly pulled over in a limo looking for the likely lads.I remember it well in the ’70’s and ’80’s before the gentrifcation and characterless development of the area.It was one scary place to pass through at night,cobbled,cold and humped with a stark East End feel to it.You’d almost feel the shadows webbing their way behind you.there used to be truck trailers and bogies parked there as there was a lot of haulage yards along the street which only added to the sense of foreboding.funnels spewed steam,smoke and various other chemical floaters into the air with dicksonian flair,again adding to the sense that you were really somewhere about Gorton,Preston or some other post industrial miasma.Basically the type of street where ravens…many of them,would congregate happily.
What I don’t understand is why it is called a hill? There’s no hill there now, and presuming this is all reclaimed sea or marshland could there ever have been a hill?
I lived in Sandwith street and it was always a hill particularly down towards the Gasworks of memory
It is actually a hill in as much as the ground rises from Cardiff lane up to the level of the Marker. If you look at the steps of the empty building on the left the rise stands out in the way the steps are built.
It’s also the windiest street in Ireland!!
[…] docklands area throws up some of the most interesting street names in Dublin, including Misery Hill, which we’ve looked at before on the site. Another curious name is ‘Blood Stoney […]