Tag Archives: City Bason

Gondolas

A superb boat or gondola has been recently finished at the Grand Canal, and is painted and decorated in a most elegant manner. It is of a smaller size than the packet boats, and intended for convenience or pleasure of the directors of that great national and useful undertaking, in order to make occasional excursions therein on the different lines of that navigation — it now lies in one of the harbours near the city Bason.

Saunders’s News-Letter 20 April 1795

The elegant gondola which we mentioned to be lying at the Canal Harbour, and to be intended for the use of the Directors, we learn is not for the use of those Gentlemen, but to carry passengers from and to Portobello, to and from the first lock to meet the passage-boats (as lately advertised) and to gratify with a short voyage on the Canal, from Portobello to James’s-street Harbour, such persons as, having no call of business or pleasure towards the county of Kildare, have not otherwise an opportunity of enjoying that gratification, which latter use of the boat is now making by many persons every fine day.

Saunders’s News-Letter 23 April 1795

From the British Newspaper Archive run by Findmypast Newspaper Archive Limited, in partnership with the British Library.

Another description of the Dublin City Bason

From the Rev G Hansbrow’s 1835 publication An Improved Topographical and Historical Hibernian Gazetteer; describing the various boroughs, baronies, buildings, cities, counties, colleries, castles, churches, curiosities, fisheries, glens, harbours, lakes, mines, mountains, provinces, parishes, rivers, spas, seats, towers, towns, villages, waterfalls, &c &c &c, scientifically arranged, with an appendix of ancient names. To which is added, an introduction to the ancient and modern history of Ireland Richard Moore Tims; William Curry, Jun and Co; John Robertson and Co, Dublin; King and Co, Cork; Marks, Waterford; Simms and Mairs, Belfast; Campbell, Derry; M’Kerin, Limerick; Wheelock, Wexford; Collins, Drogheda; Dunlap, Coleraine; Purcel, Tralee; Kyte, Cashel; Blackham, Newry; Bole, Castlebar; Devir, Westport; and other booksellers:

The City Bason is the pleasantest, most elegant and sequestered place of relaxation the citizens can boast of; the reservoir, which in part supplies the city with water, is mounded and terraced all round, and planted with quickset hedges, limes and elms, having beautiful green walks between, in a situation which commands a most satisfactory prospect of a vast extent of fine country to the south. The entrance is elegant, by a lofty iron gate, and the water that supplies it, is conveyed from the neighbouring mountains.

 

Dublin’s City Bason in 1776

I have added this description, from Richard Twiss’s A Tour in Ireland in 1775 with a Map, and a View of the Salmon-Leap at Ballyshannon [London 1776] to my second page on the abandoned Main Line of the Grand Canal in Dublin:

The city bason is a reservoir, capable of holding water to supply the city for some weeks, when the springs from whence it is filled are dry; both the springs and the reservoir were dry whilst I was in Dublin. In 1765 a canal was begun to be cut from this place, and intended to be continued to Athlone, which is about seventy English miles off, in order to open a communication with the Shannon; at the rate the work is at present carried on it bids fair for being completed in three or four centuries.