476 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 



Council. They make decidedly piquant reading, and suffice to prove 

 that our mucli-abused Board of Works is after all an improvement on 

 seventeenth-century methods. Dodson for years enjoyed a fi'ee hand and 

 a most desirable job. His original estimate amounted to above £4000, 

 and specified a wall 10 feet high and 2 feet 6 inches thick. This, one 

 would suppose, should have provided a sufficiently secui'e enclosui'e ; and 

 by 1667 Dodson had executed without demur- by the Paymaster, work 

 to the nominal value of £6000. He was injudicious enough, however, 

 to demand a hundred a year for keeping his own work in repair. This 

 led to investigation. A committee of inquiry rejiorted that the £6000 

 expended should have sufficed to erect a wall sufficiently durable to 

 obviate such early need of repair, and certified that the walls were for 

 the most part so badly executed that they could not be repaired with- 

 out being taken down and relaid, defects which they attributed as well 

 to the badness of the material as to the incompetence of the workmen 

 employed, and which could scarcely be sui'prising if, as reported by the 

 committee, Dodson had agreed with his sub -contractors to do for £30 

 that for which he was being paid £100.^ 



As erected by Dodson, the wall, following the exact bounds of the 

 lands, ran in a somewhat irregular course, following on the north the 

 old Castleknock road, and embracing on the south the meadows by the 

 Liifey on which the Kingsbridge Terminus now stands.^ In 1671 it 

 was resolved to straighten the walls, and several small lots on each 

 side of the river, inclusive of these meadows and amounting to some 

 six acres, were left out. As thus modified, the Park remained unchanged 

 for the next ten years, until, in consequence of the assignment by the 

 king of sixty-four acres on the south side for the use of the newly- 

 founded Eoyal Hospital, the whole of the lands lying south of the 

 Liffey were alienated from the Park. Advantage was taken of this 

 circumstance to obviate the inconvenience caused by the public road 

 to Chapelizod running through the Park, an arrangement which, 

 coupled with Dodson's sorry boundary walls, had been found to lead 

 to the frequent injuiy and loss of the deer. It was accordingly 

 determined to limit the Park to the lands on the north side of the 

 Liffey, taking the Chapelizod road as the boundary. Dodson being by 

 this time discredited, it was necessary to find a fresh contractor, and 

 for the construction of the new wall a cmious arrangement was 



1 Report of Sir Wm. Flower and others, Oct. 27, 1668, Ormonde MSS. 



2 A Survey of part of Newtown and Kilmainham left out of Phoenix Park, 

 Irish Record Office. 



