NILE LODGE

by Tom Kenny

The beginnings of Salthill was the crossroads at Nile Lodge which linked Palmyra Crescent with New Line, Taylors Hill and Bóthar na Trá. Nile Lodge is an early nineteenth century house of a single storey built over a basement. It was reputedly built by an officer in Nelson’s Fleet who took part in the Battle of the Nile. The interior is designed like a bridge on board ship. The house, which was finished in 1807, has rendered and painted walls, a façade of five bays, a low pitched roof with eaves and a glazed porch over a simple timber door case. Not all of this is evident in our photograph which was taken from the top of the Estoria Cinema during the very severe cold stretch of the winter of 1947. People named Judge lived in Nile Lodge, later it was owned by Dr. McMahon and later still by Dr. McDermott.

1947 was referred to as the ‘Year of the Big Snow’, the coldest and harshest winter in living memory. Because the temperature rarely rose above freezing point, the snow that had fallen in January remained until the middle of March. Worse still, all the subsequent snowfall in February and March piled on top. It created a lot of hardship, there must have been a lot of forced isolation then with people not being able to get out of their houses.  And yet, our photograph looks quite romantic, almost like a Norman Rockwell painting.

The original occupiers used to draw water from a well across the road, at the back of where Ward’s Hotel is now. The well occasionally became contaminated by sea water, so they had to build two reservoirs into the wall at the back of the property to hold the water.

The snow covered houses we see in the background are those of St. Mary’s Terrace which were built in 1898.

The Nile Lodge junction was a narrow crossroads. There was some discussion in 1951 about the erection of traffic lights there, they would have cost £600, but the advice was that better results would be got by widening the corner and placing a traffic island there. Work on that project began that year.