384) The Big Tree Tavern of Dorset Street Lower, D1
Sam Coll remembers being taken to this pub as an infant some twenty-five golden years ago, it was a favourite for the aftermaths of matches given its proximity to Croke Park - since then, one remembered it only as having been shut for years (4 years in fact), hence it was a novelty to find it open on this year of all years of our nation’s sincere centenary.
The sign says it was established in 1543 - the cynic in me wants to say ‘MY ASS’ but no doubt there was some kind of establishment trading on this spot for a very long time indeed. According to their website: “The Tavern has been on the site since 1543 originating as an Inn. Back in the medieval days it was famously known as the ‘Rose Tavern’. The pub derived its current name in the aftermath of the 1798 rebellion when after a 60 second trial by Alderman of Dublin City and judge to the prerogative court sentenced John Claudius Beresford, one of Dublin’s most notorious character’s, and 5 other men to be hanged at the spot outside the tavern where they were arrested. The tree that they were hanged from became known as the Big Tree and over the years the tavern became known as the Big Tree Tavern.”
A pint of Guinness is €5.60, pretty steep for this part of town I would think - is it any wonder we took to the Beamish, reader dear? An amusing sign says: UNAPPROVED ROAD. On the day of our visit, there was an unappealing and repellent smell of varnish throughout the establishment - its reopening must have been recent. The barman is, to be polite, ‘a bit deaf’, or, shall we say, ‘a little hearing impaired’, being slow to deliver pints or respond to repeated requests for water [1] - and, what’s more, his slowness seems strategic and arbitrary depending on customer to customer, hence, save your sympathy, this prick has picked his favourites and guttersnipes like us are not among them. A Beamo in The Auld Triangle just down the road might be the better option.
FOOTNOTE
[1] water = otherwise known as H20, this comprises some 70%-80% of our body’s mass and also constitutes a significant portion of the aqueous globe we all inhabit - it is also a tried and tested preventive hangover cure, especially when taken in conjunction with pints - fresh air and solid foods and walking between rounds is also warmly recommended - Tipplers Tip. The topic of water has given rise to this especially loving tribute, a rhapsodic-cum-scientific paean taken from you-know-where:
‘What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire?
Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator’s projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and islands, its persistent formation of homothetic islands, peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents, gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, Artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the well by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe), numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90 % of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.’ [James Joyce, Ulysses, pp. 783-5 (Bodley Head Edition)]
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