Spa

transcribed at

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Although Lucan had been known before as a health resort on account of a Chalybeate Spa which existed there, it was through his generosity that it was first made available to the public and protected from inundation by the Liffey by an enclosing wall. It's reputation stood high in the eighteenth century, and the water "in flasks carefully corked on the spot" could be obtained in Dublin but the advantage of drinking

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drinking it at the source was then well understood, and numbers flocked to the healing spring. With the invalids came the fashionable world and in 1789 it is mentioned that Lucan was the favourite summer resort and that the well was crowned with "persons of condition" who often formed dancing parties at a ball-room which had been built before that time. Not long before 1795 this ball-room was superseded  by or incorporated in THE OLD HOTEL, which is still to be seen, and which was modelled on those existing at the time in watering places in England.


 The bridge at Lucan was a never ending object of anxiety and was more than once rebuilt on a new site during the eighteenth century. Swift's well known couplet about the bounty of the man who built a bridge at the expense of the county will recall the fact that one had been erected in the time of Vesey's father. As will be seen in the picture, this stood near the present Lucan House and was in ruins soon after it was built. Another  bridge "an elegant stone structure of several

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arches ornamented with a frieze had been erected lower down the stream at that time by Vesey. But this was carried away in 1786 and a bridge was then erected in the village near the site of the present one, which dates from 1806.

This nephew Colonel George  Vesey who was an officer in the 6th Regiment of Foot, and who served at Halifax, Gibraltar, and amongst other places. Married in 1790 at Marlay, a daughter of the Right  Hon. David La Touche, and subsequently settled down at Lucan. Became a member for Tuam in the Irish Parliament. Of the history of Lucan in the nineteenth century it is  outside the scope of this work to treat, and it is less necessary as the subject has been dealt with in a handbook recently published.

The advawson of the church  which was dedicated to the B.V. was granted in the early part of the thirteenth century by Wirris Pech to the neighbouring Priory of St Catherine. The value of the Church was stated about that time to be eighteen marks, and we