New Ross is a town of winding alleys and steep streets and Barrack Lane is one of the steepest. Scramble up it, however, and you’ll discover a green gem. Officially opened at the end of June, the town’s newest public space, Library Park, is already attracting a steady stream of locals and tourists. Cars pull up and kids tumble out to climb and roll on its grassy hummocks. Adults chat on the steps of the amphitheatre, gaze at the view, take selfies at the sundial.
It is, as the explanatory leaflet suggests, a place for “reading, relaxing, contemplating, listening or just passing time”. Yet just over a year ago, this was an area of discoloured buildings, boarded-up windows and doors, and what is euphemistically called “anti-social behaviour”.
“There were five blocks of apartments, built in the Seventies, and a swimming pool which had reached the end of its useful life,” says Eamonn Hore, director of services with Wexford County Council. Nobody wanted to live in the apartments because there was only an outside stairs to the upper ones. A new swimming pool had been built across town. “And there’s not much you can do with a derelict swimming pool: it’s just a big hole in the ground with a roof on it.”
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So the council decided to demolish it all and create a park instead. A brave decision – or, at a time when the prevailing wisdom is that every spare inch of space and penny of public funding should be given over to the construction of housing stock, a foolhardy one? “We spent €332,000,” Hore says. “I was asked how many houses could you build with that, and I said ‘One and a half’. Now, it hasn’t stopped us building houses, but we had no green space in the centre of town. You can build houses for people – but you have to have places for those people to go, too.”
Library Park can be accessed from many different points in New Ross. It is hoped that, being so close to the well-used public library, the amphitheatre will prove popular as an outdoor performance space. A local schoolboy, Philip Walsh, has taken responsibility for keeping it debris-free and, even on a Saturday afternoon, is hard at work with his sweeping brush.
An engineer by training, Hore came up with the park’s key hard-landscaping concept of concentric circles and the themes of time, knowledge and storytelling. He also came up with the idea of putting an Irish proverb on each of the steps. They are not translated, so people can go away and figure out the meaning for themselves.
The planting scheme, meanwhile, is the work of garden designer Mary Reynolds, a Chelsea gold medal winner and an ardent ecologist who agreed to come on board only if the park was designated a chemical-free zone. “It’s very unusual to find a council who will let me put cardboard down, sprinkle topsoil on top and sow wildflower seeds, instead of spraying it off,” she says.
Reynolds’s idea was to make the park a haven for wildlife as well as people – which was just dandy with the local birds, who promptly made a meal of those newly sown wildflower seeds. “We’ll have to go at it again and net the seeds this time.”
The use of local materials was also crucial. “The granite is from a quarry in Carlow, just up the road,” says Hore. “It is 360 million years old, Leinster granite, which gives that nice blue-grey effect. The wood for the sculptures came from Borris House – again, just up the road. The trees are 500 years old; both had to be felled because of health-related issues.”
The Galway wood-turner Liam O’Neill transformed the ancient timber into a drinking-fountain, an inkpot and the elegant fountain-pen which forms the gnomon of the sundial. If you follow the detailed instructions in the park leaflet, you can actually tell the time. Or you can just use it as the background for a selfie.
The joy of this park is that visitors can either take it at face value, or delve into its underlying symbolism. The bracelet of grassy mounds honours the underground-dwelling people of the Tuatha Dé Danann.
An Ogham pathway showcases the 20 trees of the Ogham alphabet – except for ash, which can’t be planted just now because of dieback disease. The 24 steps, each inscribed with an Irish proverb, represent the hours in a day. There are 60 birch trees for the minutes and seconds.
The birch tree is also associated with the Celtic goddess Bríd, aka St Brigid, the patron saint of creative writing. And as a pioneer species – one of the first to recolonise damaged or disrupted ecosystems – Reynolds says it represents change, repair and a new way of thinking.
Which sums up Library Park in a nutshell.