Michelle Boyle
Virginia , Ireland
Michelle Boyle’s work explores people and place from everyday life expressed in her distinctive spontaneous and fluid way. ‘
MessageSince I was a young child I have been intrigued with hidden waterways. When I was younger, my friends and I would often follow the tributaries of the Tolka from their sources in Finglas to the main river in what is now Tolka Park. In those days much of the river above the Merville Dairy ice cream plant was relatively unpolluted so you could spend an afternoon catching pinkeens and searching under stones for catfish or racing and following makeshift small rafts as they coursed down river and negotiated the many obstacles and rapids encountered along the way, sometimes disappearing for stretches into the pipes carrying them them under stretches of footpaths or roadways, some, as we imagined, lost forever in some wondrous underground reservoir. One tributary led to the Silver Spoon which in turn fed the outdoor Cabra Baths where, if you were willing to risk the ire of the Cabra gang, you could swim safely. My grandmother
Essie was from Cabra so in some respects we had a dual passport and generally had a safe passage. There was another small river,the Bradogue, close to her house in Ventry in what was then called the “Bogies” but is now John Paul Park. Apparently when Cabra was being built there were small railway tracks here to transport materials on site and this is the source of the name, although in those days we preferred the more frightening explanation that it was the lair of the “bogeyman” and like Pennywise in Stephen King’s novel to be avoided at all costs.
The Bradogue now fully culverted flows from John Paul Park through Cabra across the Cabra Road near the “seventeen shops”and on down along the boundary of Grangegorman close to the TUD entrance and from there across through Broadstone and down Dominick Street to reach the Liffey.
During Covid, I retraced the path of the Bradogue from its source to the Liffey at Arran Quay/Ormond Quay.
Christy Grogan