Picnic at Powerscourt, Dublin

A bus ride of thirty or forty minutes would take you from the heart of Dublin city to coves, beaches, small seaside towns or open country.

Many of the student associations and clubs at my university would simply tack up a notice on one of the bulletin boards around the campus to announce a Saturday or Sunday excursion to one of those venues and a group of students would show up at the appointed busstop. No further organization was necessary. No one would have the faintest idea of the return bus schedules; there was bound to be a bus back every half hour or hour at most. At first it took a degree of faith in each other to just stand at some forlorn signpost along a country road with no signs of human habitation in evidence, waiting for a bus back home at the end of one of these excursions, but no one had ever been lost that way and one eventually became pretty nonchalant about the bus service. No one brought food for that matter, so what I call a "picnic" would have been a very impromptu affair. What mattered was mainly the conversation, or in the case of beagling, some crosscountry running.

One favorite venue was Powerscourt, at that time the actual baronial residence and estate of a real English Lord, Lord Longford, now a swank Ritz Carlton Hotel.


The vast grounds that included formal gardens and wild fields of woods, meadows, heather and even a waterfall, were open to the public. I don't think they even collected an admission fee at that time. Lord Longford was a very public spirited gentleman. At his own expense he maintained the Gate Theatre in Dublin, a fine small theater where budding actors and playwrights were given an opportunity to hone their skills and ticket prices were kept very reasonable. Often His Lordship himself, a man of lordly girth, would stand in back of the theater, dressed formally, sometimes wearing a red cummerbund, silently and unobtrusively holding a basket into which patrons could deposit donations to help sustain this wonderful theater.

At Powerscourt we would find a deserted glen near the waterfall and spend the time talking, discussing, laughing, arguing, smoking, just lounging about or lying in the fragrant, springy heather.


Back in Dublin we would go our separate ways to our digs, bedsitters or apartments, often to a pot of steaming hot tea to shake off the chill that for those hours of sheer simple pleasure we had not noticed in the slightest.