h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I was brought up in Dublin in 1940s and 1950s near Dundrum [Clonskeagh] and remember the village well - used often to cycle through or take 44 bus, going camping with Scouts in Enniskerry.

Read entry on Dundrum and it's very good and thorough. But it omits one of the most obvious buildings which one saw from main road, a bit before entering village from Dublin direction. At least you saw the high forbidding walls. In those days it was called the Criminal Lunatic Asylum. Nowadays, certainly in Britain, it would be a Special Hospital. Is it still there? If not, any traces?

And I remember the railway station - indeed was on the last train to run from Harcourt Street to Bray in 1959. One oddity was the sign saying "Station for St Columba's College", odd both in itself - why should a school have a special station? - but also because the school was several miles away, half way round Three Rock Mountain, and if I was going there I wouldn't start from Dundrum, but Rathfarnham...

The Central Mental Hospital is still there, and it still has the forbidding walls.

On reflection, I suppose St Columba's originally put up a sign there because it was [and I imagine still is] a protestant boys' boarding school, which thought of itself as the nearest thing in the Republic to an English Public School - a cut above ordinary secondary schools such as the one I attended. As such it would have needed a station before the advent of cars. But unless you came from Bray, Wicklow or beyond I can't see that it would have been any quicker to get there via Dundrum rather than direct from Kingsbridge or Amiens Street stations in Dublin city centre, even in the days of horses and traps..