“At the village of Yellow Walls, a road turns to the right over a little rivulet to Swords, and opens upon the sea…”1
In the 150 or so years since these words were written, much has changed in Yellow Walls (‘Na Ballaí Buí’ in Irish), a townland of around 405 acres2 to the west and south-west of Malahide village in north county Dublin, in a region known as ‘Fingal’.
Over the years Yellow Walls and Malahide have grown outwards and into one another and the former is now considered part of the latter. But this wasn’t always the case with Yellow Walls at one stage being considerably larger than its neighbour, thanks mainly to the large numbers employed by the local cotton industry.
Yellow Walls as shown on Rocque’s 1762 Map of County Dublin
This site presents some of the history of Yellow Walls from the Fir Domnainn and Larnians of pre-history, to the Norsemen of the early Middle Ages, and up through Malahide’s early industrial era to the present day.
Sources
1. D’Alton, John. The History of the County of Dublin. Hodges and Smith, 1838.
2. General Alphabetical Index to the Townlands and Towns, Parishes and Baronies of Ireland: based on the census of Ireland for the year 1851, Vol. 8.
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