Forty Foot

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This article is about the promontory near Dublin. For river in Cambridgeshire, see Forty Foot Drain. For the Canadian band and their debut album, see Forty Foot Echo.

The Forty Foot (Irish: Na Daichead Cnámh) is a promontory on the southern tip of Dublin Bay at Dún Laoghaire, County Dublin, Ireland, where people have swam in the Irish Sea all year round for some 250 years.^[1]^[2]

1 Use
2 Name
3 In literature
4 External links

[edit] Use

In former times it was kept solely as a gentlemen's bathing place and the gentlemen's swimming club was established to help conserve the area.^[2] Due to its isolation and gender-specific nature it became a popular spot for nudists,^[2] but in the 1970s during the women's liberation movement, a group of female equal-rights activists plunged into the waters,^[2] now it is open to women and children as well. The gentlemen's swimming club still exists and is open to both genders, it expects voluntary contributions to the upkeep of the area.^[2]

[edit] Name

It area may have been called the Forty Foot after the 42nd Highland Regiment of Foot (now known as the Black Watch), a regiment of the British Army, which built a fortress here in 1747 when it was sent over to repulse any possible Napoleonic invasion of Ireland. The fortifications included 'the battery', the massive granite walls and the Martello tower.

However, this cannot be backed up by British Army records.^{[citation needed]} An alternative theory is that it took its name from the nearest train stop in the 1800s, which was at Dun Laoghaire (then Kingstown). Just outside the station, the road leading up to the town was 40ft wide. Passengers from Dublin coming for a swim said they were alighting at the "forty foot" and over time the name transferred itself to the swimming spot, which back then was about 20 feet to the left of where most swimmers now enter the water.^{[citation needed]} However the depth immediately off the steps at high tide is closer to 12-15 feet, so this is also in dispute.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] In literature

James Joyce resided at Martello tower for a while and he used it in his novel Ulysses, where ome of his characters set out on the morning of June 16, 1904 from the tower on their Homeric odyssey through Dublin; these features are still extant here. The Forty Foot also featured heavily in the novels At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien (1939) and At Swim, Two Boys by Jamie O'Neill (2001).