A visit to the ‘other’ Raglan Road

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 25/10/2016 (3356 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Seventy years ago, on Oct. 3, 1946, The Irish Press published a poem by Patrick Kavanagh. It was called Dark Haired Miriam Ran Away but it’s better known by the Dublin street in its opening line, On Raglan Road.

That’s the name of the verse put to song by The Dubliners in the mid-1960s and covered by the likes of Van Morrison, Billy Bragg and Loreena McKennitt:

“On Raglan Road on an autumn day I met her first and knew
That her dark hair would weave a snare that I might one day rue.”

In Wolseley in autumn, on our own Rue Raglan, it’s difficult not to hum the ballad:

“I saw the danger, yet I walked along the enchanted way,
And I said let grief be a fallen leaf at the dawning of the day.”

Like its Dublin namesake, our Raglan Road may very well be “a quiet street where old ghosts meet”, especially as Halloween approaches.

The lyrics are the poet’s bitter personal account of unrequited love for a legendary beauty and medical student — later physician — Hilda Moriarty, 18 years his junior.

Both the Wolseley and Dublin Raglan Roads are named for FitzRoy Somerset, 1st Baron Raglan, a Crimean War field marshal. Significantly, he was the first person to wear raglan-sleeves, the distinguishing feature of a coat created for him by the tailors Aquascutum after he lost an arm in battle.

This spring, I strolled Dublin’s Raglan Road, when leaves were still emerging. It’s just two blocks, so a short street like ours. It’s also exclusively residential… exclusive with three-storey, red brick dwellings.

These are Georgian style row houses and single mansions dating from the late 1850s. The houses are therefore about 50 years older than our own.

No. 19 is the massive home where Kavanagh boarded in 1945. Today, it’s the Mexican embassy in Ireland. Other Raglan residences are now the Moroccan and Turkish embassies.

The houses are set further back from the sidewalk than ours but with similar hedges and plantings in front. The birdsong is familiar, vibrant in garden and sidewalk trees (no grassy boulevard here).

Parking is similarly restricted, “08:00 –18:30, Mon-Fri” (ours to 17:30). The signs are bilingual — English and Irish Gaelic. The rolling garbage bins are exactly like ours, but green and branded “Greyhound”.

I took this as a lucky sign, a wink to my retired racing dog, Styxx back home on Raglan Road.

Gail Perry is a community correspondent for Wolseley. She can be reached at: gailperry.writer@gmail.com