SHE does not even merit a footnote in the history books, but Etty Scott holds a distinction matched by few Irish men or women the lady started a gold rush.
Etty Scott was once dubbed the "Joan of Arc of Dalkey Common". With her dark, flashing eyes and solemn demeanour, she was known as a "beautiful dreamer of secreted treasure". Fourteen years before American and European fortune seekers rushed to California from the east in search of gold, thousands of hopeful Dubliners are said to have converged on a rocky stretch of shoreline at Dalkey.
Inspired by Etty Scott, a quarry man's daughter, they crawled over the "Long Rock" looking for lumps of gold thought to have been left behind by careless Danish invaders in the 11th century.
The Dalkey Gold Rush began in 1834. At the time, Dalkey was a poor rural village which had long lost its pre eminence as the port of Dublin. The village was largely inhabited by fishermen and stone cutters working at the quarry to provide granite for Dun Laoghaire (Kingstown) harbour. They lived in hovels clustered around the village and the barren seashore remained largely uninhabited.
And then along came Etty to change their lives. A rare account of the gold rush in Gaskin's Irish Varieties of 1869 describes her as a "beautiful, kind hearted girl" whose much brown hair clustered down her neck and lay in massive curls upon her sunburnt bosom".
One stormy night, in her cabin on Dalkey Hill, she had a dream in which it was revealed to her that the Danes had buried "enormous treasures" under the "Long Rock" after one of their lengthy plunder, and pillage sessions. They had later been forced to flee Dalkey somewhat pressed for time, the forgetful foreigners neglected to take their booty with them.
Moment of Golden Slumber
On the following morning, Etty told her father about her moment of golden slumber and the word quickly spread to the quarry workers and squatters who lived on Dalkey Common. Suddenly, Dalkey was transformed into the El Dorado of south county Dublin.
Etty became a heroine of the sleepy seaside village, celebrated in poems and ballads
Thou art like the depths where the seas have births, rich in the wealth that is lost from Earth.
All the sere flowers of our days gone by, and the buried gems in thy bosom lie.
After a meeting on the common, Etty assembled a motley gang of followers who were promised untold riches if they agreed to follow her instructions and mine the rock which had popped up in her dream. According to Gaskin's colourful account of Dalkey's golden moment, she told them solemnly "Wait with patience the fitting moment, for the secreted treasure of the Dane will be surely found if you hearken to my voice.
With such stirring words of encouragement, who would not have downed their tools and left everything to follow Dalkey's Joan of Arc?
For 12 hours every day the miners hammered, drilled and blasted the rocks, watched over by the stony faced Etty and a large crowd of curious spectators. The gold dreamer sat on the rock holding a gaming cock and a knife. Etty was said to be waiting for an omen. A "fiend, gnome, ghoul or spirit of good or ill omen" was expected to make an appearance as a harbinger of the gold. When the ghoul appeared, Etty was prepared to plunge the knife into the unfortunate cock.
Curious Spectacle
This curious mining spectacle continued for months and became an attraction for Dubliners in search of weekend diversion. Luckily for the cock, there was no sign of any gold.
Not everyone treated the gold dreamer with the reverence she deserved and a group of idle pranksters met in a house on Castle Street to plot a feline prank which would eventually bring the gold rush to an end. The group of medical students brought two black cats from the city. They attached long cords to the cats' tales. Lighted torches of turpentine were affixed to the ends of the cords and the animals were covered with dry phosphorous. The pranksters secretly unbagged the cats from a boat on to the "Long Rock" all of a sudden, the scene was lit up with a ghostly vision as the cats danced from rock to rock and then let out screams which echoed around the shore. Etty appeared to be unfazed by this startling vision, but her followers and the spectators fled in terror.
After the prank was uncovered the rush for gold quickly came to an end and the unfortunate Etty retreated to her cabin. She continued to dream, but nobody followed her flights of fancy.
One of the miners, Pat Kavanagh, earned the nickname "Ali Baba" after the flashing cat incident, those being the words he uttered when the luminous pussies appeared.
Prophecy Fulfilled
Etty Scott may have become the subject of ridicule around the village and beyond, but in' the end her dream turned out to be propheti old was not discovered under the rocks but I came to the village soon after wards with the extension of I land's first railway from Kingstown to Dalke Gaskin described it as "the model railway of the British Empire". Suddenly, Dalkey became a fashionable outpost for the merchants and city bigwigs, much as it now is for the rock stars of Dublin.
Gold fever was replaced by land acquisition mania. People came in their hundreds to build their ostentatious villas along the rocky shore where Etty's miners had dug for Danish gold. The big shots from the city bought the land from the miners and many of Etty's poor followers became rich.
The site of the phantom gold mine can be seen on the road from Dalkey village to Coliemore harbour. Inniscorrig, an imposing granite house which looks like a laird's castle transported from the Scottish Highlands to the Irish coast, stands on a site which was sold by one of Etty's miners, Pat Byrne. Next to it stands another Victorian seaside palace, the modestly named Elsinore. Dozens of other plots of land which were occupied by Etty's squatting miners were also sold and are now worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.
A reprinted edition of Gaskin's Irish Varieties was produced by the Exchange Bookshop in Dalkey a few years ago and a few copies are still available.