Nog, Pigeon House Road

Driving past, I pulled in when I noticed the yellow door was open. This is the only door I've seen on Pigeon House Road (on the heavily industrialised Poolbeg Peninsula) naming the actual address. And I've only once seen it open before today, but was in a hurry that time. I had Lola in the car, impatient to get to the Shelly Beds beach. Light was going of course (dusk is my time, as you may know), so I took out the tripod and started shooting. The man in the picture was clearing branches from the footpath, presumably after a trimming back of undergrowth somewhere nearby. That's part of what I love about this stretch, over and undergrowth sprawling between the industries. We talked a bit about this building which was apparently the TB hospital, which I'd heard about. Here's a description I found with a quick google:

'The TB sanatorium was opened on the site in 1907, and initially called the Alan A Ryan Home, after its American benefactor. The first official reference to any kind of medical facility occurs on the 1912 Ordnance Survey map of the city which refers to an ‘isolation hospital'. The 1936 edition of the OS city map refers to the same building as a ‘tuberculosis hospital.’ TB was by now rife in the city’s tenement districts. The maps also show the addition of a Catholic convent and a chapel. By this time, the sanatorium is colloquially known as ‘The Pigeon House’. Contemporary documents refer to it as the final destination for “terminal” sufferers.

We introduced each other belatedly and I gave him my card. His name Nog is a nickname. Better than my own nickname in school, Granny (after my surname, Granier).

So Lola got her gambols eventually, on a dark, empty beach streaming with ankle-high veils of fine, wind-blown sand. The sky was spectacular, lagoons of inky clouds touched with pinky orange from the city lights. Very Christmassy, the RTE mast festive as an Eiffel Tower.

A lovely curtain call to a day whose highlight was a half hour with the wean (before they left for Wexford), singing along to Madness's Baggy Trousers, which he demanded to hear again.