Page 114 - Greystones Archaeological Historical Society

CÚL OF THE ROCK

The Cúl of the Rock

Picturing the past by examining its images

Seamus Hayden

Introduction

E
arly in 2014 I set myself the task of chronicling the
development of Greystones from a ‘noted fishing place’ to
the small County Wicklow harbour town I was born into
almost a century and a half later. The ‘Cúl of the Rock’, I felt, was
at the core of it. An almost forgotten place name at the time I first
heard it from Dr Eric Doyle in 1956.

In furtherance of this project I read everything I could readily
get my hands on. [1 - 5] Most of all I scrutinised the seven books of
old photographs and documents of Greystones and its north
County Wicklow environs [6-12] published by fellow Greystones
man Derek Paine and his son Gary. I owned all seven. It was
then my narrative came alive for me.

Given the connection with Greystones of Robert French,
famous chief photographer of William Lawrence, it was natural
that I also searched the digitised Lawrence Collections of the
Photographic Archive in the National Library of Ireland. [13]

What I observed was that, on occasions, original scenes
were re-photographed at later dates while still retaining their
original William Lawrence reference numbers. On other
admittedly rare occasions, I noticed that images appeared to
have been deliberately flipped, or to have been represented as
something else. The implication for my search was that I would
need to be careful.
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