Unlike its largest tributary the Dodder, which takes a direct and un-doddery path from the Wicklow Mountains to the sea, the river Liffey reaches Dublin by a very roundabout route.
From its source near Kippure, it carves a giant, wobbly letter C in the Leinster landscape, heading first southwest into Co Kildare, apparently bound for the midlands, before a dramatic change of course at Newbridge.
From there, it turns east and proceeds towards the city, still wobbling, until a late, straight sprint down the quays to Dublin Bay.
The total journey is 129km, five kilometres longer than it used to be thanks to various engineering works. But the river’s source and mouth are only 22km apart – slightly shorter than the Dodder. You can see both from the top of Kippure Mountain that stands on the Dublin-Wicklow border.
It was this near circularity, the proximity of the Liffey’s birth and death, that inspired James Joyce to make it the universal river of his great – if hard-to-read – masterpiece, Finnegans Wake.
Inspired also by the drinking song of similar (but apostrophised) title, in which a builder falls to his death from a ladder only to be miraculously revived, the cyclical novel charts the continuous rise and fall of mankind, encompassing all human history in an equally-universal Dublin.
As Anna Livia Plurabelle, the river is the book’s female spirit, who marries a Scandinavian of dubious character and, throughout the novel’s events, sleeps beside him above a pub in Chapelizod.
Back in the physical world, meanwhile, the Liffey serves many more practical purposes. These include providing – according to Uisce Éireann, the State’s water utility – 85 per cent of the drinking water to the Greater Dublin Area, although none ends up in Guinness, contrary to myth.
It also lends itself to fishing, to the rowing clubs of Islandbridge and to the annual Liffey Swim, famously painted by Jack B Yeats, who won an Olympic medal for it.
Crucially, too, after all its meandering, the river supplies Dublin with a linear, internal border: dividing the city into a binary north and south, a conceit cherished equally by the supposedly humble or exalted residents on either side.
And yet, for such a famous and important waterway, the Liffey’s source is disappointingly obscure, as I discover when searching for it with video journalist Bryan O’Brien.
It’s in the middle of a blanket bog – the Liffey Head Bog, logically enough – which covers thousands of acres on either side of the old Military Road, near the Sally Gap. But there are no signposts or markers, other than the Liffey Head Bridge – the first and least impressive of the many bridges to cross the river.
From that, we knew, the source was only a few hundred metres away, to our southeast. Unfortunately, even under the bridge named for it, the Liffey there is still only an untraceable rumour.
Google Maps is no help. And so untamed is the landscape before us that, seeing workmen in the wilderness to the other side of the road, we trek over to them for orientation advice.
The men are part of a project to rewet the bog: laying miniature, locked canals where there used to be drains, thereby trapping carbon and leaving the peat to grow undisturbed.
Asked about the source, they point us back across the road towards a stone landmark on a distant ridge. And half an hour’s hard tramping later, we are at the ruins of Grouse House, a small 18th-century hunting lodge.
There is indeed an impressive pool of water here, perhaps worthy of being a great river’s birthplace. But as I now know, it is several hundred metres too far from the road.
Retracing our steps, we later chance upon a steep bank in turf, and a circular pond, that may have been the real thing, or close to it.
Soon after that, I lose my footing on what looks like firm greenery, but isn’t, and go splat. And from there I squelch homeward, perhaps carrying some of the embryonic Liffey in my socks and trouser legs, but still uncertain if we have found the exact source.
With the wisdom of hindsight, we should have brought Christopher Moriarty on our mission. The greatest living expert on the river, he too fell in it once – as a small child, before the second World War – and has been immersed in the subject ever since.
The culmination of a life’s study was his 2018 book: The River Liffey – History and Heritage, which includes detailed descriptions of the source and where to find it.
The book is also reassuring, however, about the confusion we experienced, because Moriarty admits the river’s origin is “an extremely complex situation” even for experts.
The usual convention for geographers is to identify its highest point as the source of any river. In the case of the Liffey, they failed miserably
— Christopher Moriarty
One of the latter, his hydrologist son, Patrick, on a 2013 visit found that the pond marked on maps as the source is in fact separate from “a gurgling stream that burrows down and flows underneath”. As Moriarty concludes: “The shape of the source is continually changing.”
The search for it has often also been complicated by its early tributaries, joining from higher up the mountains. Another problem for cartographers, traditionally, was the wild men of Wicklow, who did not appreciate the map-making efforts of the regime in Dublin.
For this and other reasons, the correct location was a late arrival to maps, in the 19th century. But even the Ordnance Survey got it badly wrong at first.
“The usual convention for geographers is to identify its highest point as the source of any river,” writes Moriarty. “In the case of the Liffey, they failed miserably.”
Where the river’s ancient name comes from is an even more complicated subject.
One fanciful theory, mentioned in an 11th-12th century text, is that it derived from Life, a daughter of Cannan the Pict, who chose the surrounding plain as a place to live with her husband. At her bidding, the husband – a steward of the king of Tara – “dealt out no more liquor to the men of Erin until yon plain was called by his wife’s name” (Mag Lifi).
A more likely scenario is that, as with other great Irish rivers, the name derives from a language used by pre-Celtic inhabitants of Ireland and now lost to us.
In the Annals of the Four Masters, it is called variously Life, Liffe, Liphe, Liphte, and Abhainn Liffe. From that last name came another, also in the annals, both simplifying the Irish pronunciation and, long before Joyce, conferring the river with a female personality: “Anna-Liffey.”
The river and its surrounds date from “the Age of the World 3656″. But in many early mentions, it is the Liffey plain rather than the river itself that features.
An exception, suggesting climate change, was AD 1452, when after 500 years of silence about the river, the annals note a “sure wonderful presage” in which a two-mile-long section “dried up”.
Getting back to Joyce, the key to understanding Finnegans Wake – experts insist – is to read it aloud, as he himself did on record in a mellifluous, exaggerated lilt.
Tellingly, he chose part of a celebrated chapter that records Anna Livia’s life from infancy to old age while punning on the names of hundreds of other rivers from around the world.
Thanks to Joyce, the Liffey is a sort of literary Ganges. Although few people read Finnegans Wake, those who do can be extraordinarily devoted to it.
One group in California, led by a former associate of avant-garde musician Frank Zappa, recently finished a 28-year cycle in which they read the Wake at a rate of one page a month.
Next week, as the book does, they will pick up from the middle of the sentence they finished with and start all over again: “ ... riverrun past Eve and Adam’s”.
