“A cyclone lasting five minutes swept across the Yellow Walls district at Malahide on Sunday evening at about six o’clock.”1
On the 18th of August 1931 the Irish Times carried a report1 entitled “Cyclone at Malahide”.
It described how “a cyclone lasting five minutes swept across the Yellow Walls district at Malahide on Sunday evening at about six o’clock.”
Damage to property and crops was extensive as “three cottages were stripped, and a rick of hay lifted into the air.”
A tree on the land of a farmer named Delaney was “torn up by the roots, while fifty cocks of hay were lifted high in the air by the cyclone, and were carried about one hundred and fifty yards.”
This was minor, though, compared with the storm that struck Malahide nearly 80 years earlier on Christmas Day, 1859.
According to a newspaper report2 of the time:
Almost every house in this comparatively sheltered village has suffered more or less from the hurricane. Windows were blown in and roofs and chimneys carried away in every direction. Two large pinnacles of the Roman Catholic chapel* (a new edifice) were torn away and thrown to the ground. A large number of trees in Lord Talbot de Malahide’s demesne were blown down, and similar devastation was occasioned in the adjacent demesnes. The strongest and most substantial houses rocked to their very foundations, but we have not heard of any accident to life or limb.
*This is Saint Sylvester’s church in Malahide village.
Sources
1. Irish Times, Aug 18, 1931.
2. The Times (London, England), Dec 29, 1852.
