St Anne's Park
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
St. Anne's Park is a public recreational area in Raheny, a suburb on the northside of Dublin, Ireland.
The Park is part of a former 500-acre estate owned by Arthur Guinness and Benjamin Lee Guinness. The estate, which dates to 1835, was named St. Anne's after the Holy Well of the same name on the lands. Sir Arthur Edward Guinness (Lord Ardilaun) was the person most responsible for expanding and developing the estate and gardens and planted evergreen (holm) oaks and pines along the main avenue and estate boundaries.
Lord and Lady Ardilaun had no children and the estate passed to their nephew Bishop Plunkett in the 1920s. In 1937, he decided he could no longer maintain such a large estate and negotiations with Dublin Corporation resulted in the house and estate being sold to the Corporation for approximately £55,000 in 1939. Bishop Plunkett retained Sybil Hill (now St. Paul's College) as a private residence with 30 acres (121,000 m²) of parkland. In December 1943, the main residence of St. Anne's "The Mansion" was gutted by a fire and the ruins demolished in 1968. In the meantime, just over 200 acres (809,000 m²) of the estate were developed for public housing with the central most attractive portion comprising about 270 acres (1,093,000 m²) retained as parkland.
The elaborate Tudor redbrick Ardilaun stables survive, as do most of the follies. The walled garden, including a fruit garden added to the estate by Bishop Plunkett, is now a 12-acre (49,000 m²) plant nursery for the Parks Department. Thousands of bedding plants, shrubs, trees, and floral tubs are produced annually in the nursery.
The park is intensively used by the public through its 35 playing pitches, 18 hard-surfaced tennis courts, and a par-3 golf course. Woodland paths add to the charm of the park as does a sunken garden constructed in the early 1970s. In 1975, St. Anne's Rose Garden was opened to the public. In 1980 it was given a Civic Award by Bord Failte and the Irish Town Planning Institute and since 1981 it has been a centre for International Rose Trials.
