Whitehall

St. Mark's Family Resource Centre

St Mark's, Cookstown Lane, is in the townland of Whitehall and is known locally as The Farm. This house retains a link to the former agricultural farming landscape. A simple, robust house retaining its original proportions, one of few surviving period farmhouses of Tallaght. This house retains an historical link amongst the recently built housing estates in the area and serves as community facility. St Mark's is a detached three-bay two-storey house, built in the 1800's,. The house has roughcast rendered walls with a smooth rendered base course. The door is timber-panelled with plain fanlight, flanked by fluted columns. There is a hipped slate roof with a chimney-stack to the rear and there is also an extension to the rear of the house. The name of St Mark is used throughout the local Catholic Parish for schools, churches, local clubs and societies such as GAA, soccer and scouts etc., forging a link for the three areas of Springfield, Belgard and Fettercairn. The new housing estates of the area straddle the townlands of Whitehall, Cookstown, Belgard and Tallaght

Whitehall and Katherine Tynan

Whitehall, the home of Katherine Tynan, is situated on the Ballymount Road, in the townsland of Kingswood or Garranstown. Katherine Tynan (1861-1931) is a major literary figure associated with South Dublin. She was the fourth daughter of Andrew C. Tynan, Whitehall, and at the age of 17 published her first book of verse, which was followed two years later by a novel. She was one of a band of Irish writers resident in London in the 1880's who combined to make the Irish Literary Movement. Many of the leaders of the emerging cultural movement visited her at Whitehall.

She was a close friend of W.B Yeats and John Butler Yeats painted her portrait. Her prolific output included 18 volumes of poetry, 105 novels and 38 other miscellaneous books, including five volumes of autobiography. Tynan also worked for improved conditions for shop girls and single mothers and was against capital punishment. She pressed for votes for women, and with Lady Aberdeen, attended the World Congress of Women in Rome in 1914. President Mary Robinson unveiled a plaque in Katherine Tynan's honour in the pocket park in Tallaght village. In her "South County Scrapbook" Mary McNally quotes Tynan's 1917 poem for her father, "The Aerodrome":

T'was well he did not stay to know

Defaced and all defiled,

The quiet fields of long ago,

Dear to him as a child .