A Walk In The Parks–Part 1

I decided to take a break from pounding the streets and hit a few parks today for a change.

I started off hunting around in Palmerstown for the park that I assumed would give me a shot of Farmleigh bridge. The only Dublin bridge I’d failed to take a photograph of on St Patrick’s day. After a little bit of aimless wandering I found Waterstown Park, abandoned the car and took a look around. It’s a really nice place. Open air / public exercise machines like those we all thought quite odd to see in Istanbul. Cool idea. Great walking paths and a nice paved and very well maintained cycle path. Excellent 2.5km circuit for those interested in such things. You can get right under the M50 bridge from it, although you have to clamber over a few rocks and take care to avoid the rubbish as you exit the eastern edge.

Lots of blossom happening. The Whitethorn is particularly striking but the dominant colour was yellow from daffodils, buttercups and dandelions.

And then at the eastern edge of the park there was my elusive bridge – the now thoroughly abandoned Farmleigh Bridge, on of only two specifically pedestrian bridges across the liffey in Dublin up until the Millennium Bridge was added in 1999. All shuttered up now, and there’s nothing left apart from the frame. It’s a pity really, I’d love to see it open and providing a link over to Phoenix Park. I also need to figure out how exactly it connected to Farmleigh, which is just across the river but it is quite a ways up and over the hillside that you can see in these pictures. 

On the way back I noticed an odd flash of blue and silver in the trees and found a rather eclectic rag tree lurking slightly off the main path. I love the madness of the items that are left in these places. Little fairy ornaments, giant rosary beads, pint glasses, Buddhas, dried flowers, plastic birds, lamshades, dream catchers, wind chimes, angels, plastic dolphins ..