Ruin With A View

Before picking up the wean I took Lola for a walk on the beach at Blackrock. The tide was mostly out, the day cloudy and mild, a lá bog (minus the rain at that moment). I had put on my wellingtons so I was able to walk across the shining sand dotted with worm-casts, through a shallow lagoon and towards something I've often wondered about: the little brick ruin on that small promontory jutting between Blackrock beach and Monkstown/Seapoint. It's at the bottom of an odd little hump of a hill, with a train tunnel and heavily graffitied bridge rising behind it. It may be the ruins of a summer house that was once on the property of Blackrock House (built in 1774 by Sir John Lees), one of the few grand historic dwellings left in Blackrock, though now divided into flats. There is a little harbour nearby (apparently Lord Cloncurry's) and another ruin of small building, this one furnished with nests of beer cans and excrement, etc. But the summer house, I was pleased to see, was clear: a gravel floor, presumably once a room of some kind. A view of the sea, with a ferry not 'stuck in the afternoon' like Larkin's steamer, but moving swiftly along the horizon.