Ravensdale and Poddle Park

Mill country

Between Kimmage Cross Roads and Sundrive Road the Poddle was once lined with mills. The first Ordnance Survey maps of the 1830s and 1840s show Ravensdale Mills, a corn and flour mill with its own pond, sluice and weir on Kimmage Road Lower, where Ravensdale Park is today. It was still marked on the map in 1940.

Downstream, Larkfield Mills and its pond stood where Sundrive Shopping Centre is now, and another mill and pond sat beside the river near today’s St Martin’s Drive, with a windmill nearby on the same old mill-pond ground. The stump of a windmill survives in St Martin’s Park. At Larkfield, the Plunkett family’s mill and farm later served as a store for weapons landed in the Howth gun-running of 1914.

Near the crossroads, Farrington’s flour mill ran a water turbine into the 1920s; Mr Farrington is remembered as the first person in the area with electric light, until the ESB arrived and he had to stop.

St Anne’s and Brooklawn

Past Kimmage Manor the river runs underground through St Anne’s, comes up near the crossroads, dives under the junction and emerges again in Ravensdale Park. It once flowed through the grounds of Brooklawn, a large house beside the crossroads, and through the St Anne’s estate, where its banks stood fifteen to twenty feet high.

When developers proposed flats on the St Anne’s lands in the early 1970s, with the river to be culverted, the plans were opposed. Dublin Corporation and Dublin County Council refused one scheme for 108 flats on 10 January 1974, citing the river and the land’s zoning as open space.

Flood works

This stretch is central to the River Poddle Flood Alleviation Scheme. Ravensdale Park is being reshaped to store flood water, with new flood walls and a replacement footbridge. Poddle Park gets walls, a sloped path and a new pedestrian bridge, and a flood wall is planned at the end of St Martin’s Drive. Behind Grosvenor Court the river is being realigned with embankments on both sides. Works began in Ravensdale Park in 2025.