Dún Laoghaire
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Dún Laoghaire Kingstown |
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| Town | |
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 Dún Laoghaire
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| Coordinates: 53°18′N 6°08′W / 53.30°N 6.14°WCoordinates: 53°18′N 6°08′W / 53.30°N 6.14°W | |
| Country | Ireland |
| Province | Leinster |
| County | Dún Laoghaire–Rathdown |
| Elevation | 24 m (79 ft) |
| Population (2006) | |
| • Urban | 38,761 |
| Irish Grid Reference | O241284 |
| Website | www |
Dún Laoghaire (Irish pronunciation: [d̪ˠuːn̪ˠ ˈɫeːrʲə]) is a suburban seaside town in County Dublin, Ireland, about 12 km (7.5 miles) south of Dublin city centre. Formerly a major port of entry from Great Britain, from 1821 to 1920 it was named Kingstown.
The town's name means "fort of Laoghaire". This refers to Lóegaire mac Néill (modern spelling: Laoghaire Mac Néill), a 5th century High King of Ireland, who chose the site as a sea base from which to carry out raids on Britain and Gaul. Traces of fortifications from that time have been found on the coast, and some of the stone is kept in the Maritime Museum.
The name is sometimes unofficially spelt in modern Irish orthography as Dún Laoire or Dún Laoighre. In some cases, the old anglicised spelling Dunleary /dʌnˈlɪəri/ is seen. This is also how the town's name is commonly pronounced.
Dún Laoghaire dates from the 1820s. An earlier Dún Laoghaire village was around the area where the Purty Kitchen pub is now (sometimes mapped as "Old Dunleary"). Dún Laoghaire had a coffee house and a small cove, both of which are shown on a number of old maps, and it may have had a salt mine (Salthill is close by). At that time, the area was a craggy, rocky pasture with some quarries.
Around 1800, some maps show a small town centre along what is now Cumberland Street, close to the junction with York Road. On the night of 18-19 November 1807, two troopships, the Prince of Wales, and the Rochdale, which had departed from Dublin, were driven on the rocks between Blackrock and Dún Laoghaire with the loss of over 400 lives. This disaster gave new impetus to an existing campaign for a harbour to be constructed near Dublin. By 1816, the legislation was passed authorising the construction of what is now called the "West Pier". The lines of the current town centre including George's Street and most adjoining streets are clearly shown on maps prepared for the development of the harbour, and in particular on a John Rennie plan of 1817, when construction of that town centre had barely commenced at the western end of George's Street. That street may originally have been laid out as a military road connecting the Dún Laoghaire Martello Towers—one at the Peoples Park, the other near the end of the West Pier—both of which have long disappeared. Whatever its origins, the street was clearly an engineer's design, being ruler-straight for all of its length (except the small western part which clearly pre-dates 1816). When King George IV came to visit the new port under construction in 1821, the name Dunleary was dropped in favour of "Kingstown"; the town returned to its former name in 1920, in the lead-up to the creation of the Irish Free State. By the time the Ordnance Survey was completed around 1845, the maps show buildings on much of the street and adjacent streets.
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