Dalkey Castle and the town's literary streak

Most people are surprised to find a medieval castle sitting on the main street of a seaside village. The reason it is there says a lot about why Dalkey exists at all.

A warehouse, not a fortress

Dalkey Castle, long known as Goat Castle, was built around 1390. It was never the home of a lord. It was a fortified stone warehouse, put up by merchants to protect goods moving in and out of the harbour. In the late Middle Ages the River Liffey was too shallow for large ships, so Dalkey served as the deep-water port for Dublin, and valuable cargo needed somewhere defensible to sit. The building is Norman in style, three storeys of rubble masonry facing onto Castle Street.

The merchants did not build just one. Dalkey once had seven of these fortified stores. Only two survive: Goat Castle, now the heritage centre, and Archbold's Castle directly across the street. The Goat name comes from the Cheevers family, who held it in the 1600s, chèvre being the French for goat. Beside the castle stands the ruin of St Begnet's church and its old graveyard, the religious heart of the medieval town.

The heritage centre

The castle was restored through the 1990s and opened as Dalkey Castle and Heritage Centre in 1998. It is a livelier visit than the word museum suggests, with costumed actors playing out the town's history, access to the battlements, and the church and graveyard to explore. Upstairs, a Writers' Gallery gathers the work of dozens of local writers, which is the natural bridge to the other thing Dalkey is known for.

The literary streak

For a village this size, Dalkey's roll of writers is absurd. James Joyce taught at a school here in the spring of 1904 and set the second chapter of Ulysses, the Nestor episode, in a Dalkey classroom. Flann O'Brien thought enough of the place to name his last novel The Dalkey Archive, published in 1964, in which both Saint Augustine and Joyce turn up as characters. The novelist Maeve Binchy and the playwright Hugh Leonard were both Dalkey people, and George Bernard Shaw and Samuel Beckett belong to the village's wider literary map too.

That history is still working. Every June the Dalkey Book Festival takes over the village for a weekend, and over the years it has drawn the likes of Salman Rushdie, Seamus Heaney, Edna O'Brien and Roddy Doyle to a few small streets by the sea.

Visiting

The castle runs guided tours, and it is also the starting point for guided literary walks that take in the spots tied to Joyce and the others. Check current times before you travel, since the schedule changes with the season. The whole thing is right in the centre of the village, a couple of minutes from the DART, so it slots easily into a day that also takes in the hill or the harbour.