Paddy Ryan visits one of the few buildings left from the medieval city of Dublin

 

Believed to be constructed close to a well that was used to baptise by its namesake himself, Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in the heart of Dublin, is among the city’s top tourist attractions. While this may have little to do with our revered patron, it offers fascinating glimpses into the eight centuries of its existence.

The upheaval of the Reformation in the 16th century changed Saint Patrick’s into a more austere place of Anglican worship.

That austerity was turned on its head, a century later, when Richard Boyle, Earl of Cork, erected a most elaborate monument to his family. Despite its boasting, bling and blatant lies about his ancestry, this monument was some achievement for a man who arrived penniless in Ireland, decades earlier.

While the Boyle monument is the most elaborate in Saint Patrick’s, there are other memorials, in both marble on the walls and in the stained-glass windows, to bishops, soldiers, poets, Presidents, musicians, kings and wars.
Indeed, one of the most poignant over a Victorian verse commemorates the bravery of John McNeill-Boyd, Captain of HMS Ajax, who perished off the rocks at Kingstown (Dún Laoire) in February 1861 while trying to save the crew of the Brig, Neptune:
‘Heroic sailor! From that fatal sea,
A city vows this marble unto thee
And here in this calm place, where
never din
Of earth’s great water floods shall
enter in.’

Continue reading in this week’s Ireland’s Own