Tavern, Dublin South City, Co. Dublin
Co. Dublin |
Temporary/Seasonal
A tavern called The Dun Horse operated somewhere along the Dublin waterfront in the late seventeenth century, and that, more or less, is where the certainty ends.
No building survives, no precise address has been established, and the establishment itself left almost no trace in the historical record beyond a handful of references. What lingers is a name, a rough location, and a three-year window of activity that places it in one of the more turbulent periods of the city's early modern life.
The historian John de Courcy, writing in 1996, places The Dun Horse near the Liffey at Lazar's Hill during the years 1676 to 1679. Lazar's Hill was the name then given to the rising ground on the south side of the river, east of the old city walls, roughly corresponding to the area now known as Townsend Street. The name itself recalls a leper hospital, or lazar house, that had stood in the vicinity in medieval times, a reminder that the neighbourhood had long existed at the margins of the city proper. By the 1670s the area was developing as Dublin expanded beyond its medieval core, and a tavern near the riverbank would have served the traffic of a busy and growing quayside. The dun horse of the name refers simply to a grey or dull-brown horse, a common enough choice for a tavern sign in an era when such imagery served as a practical identifier for customers who could not read.
Because the site has never been precisely located, there is no specific building to seek out, and any physical trace of The Dun Horse has long since been buried under subsequent centuries of development. What a visitor can do is walk the Townsend Street area and the southern quays east of the city centre, where the general character of the old Lazar's Hill district can still be loosely imagined, even if the streetscape itself is largely nineteenth- and twentieth-century in character. The interest here is less in finding a place than in acknowledging a gap; a small establishment that existed, served its purpose, and disappeared without leaving enough of a record to be properly recovered.