Montpelier Hill

Montpelier Hill rises 383 metres over south Dublin, and the squat granite ruin on its summit — known to every Dubliner as the Hell Fire Club — may be the most storied building on the city's skyline. It began prosaically: a shooting lodge built around 1725 for William Conolly, Speaker of the Irish House of Commons, whose masons quarried a 5,000-year-old passage tomb for building stone. When a storm stripped the slate roof soon afterwards, local tradition — recorded from schoolchildren's informants in 1937-39 — said the Devil had blown it off in revenge for the desecrated cairn. Conolly's answer was a massive arched stone vault that still roofs the building three centuries later. The lodge's diabolical fame rests on the Dublin Hellfire Club of the late 1730s, aristocratic blasphemers whose documented haunt was actually the Eagle Tavern on Cork Hill: the club's historian, David Ryan, found no evidence they ever met on the hill. The tale of a cloven-hoofed stranger at the card table was collected here in the 1930s — and, almost beat for beat, at Loftus Hall in Wexford. In 2016, archaeologists digging behind the ruin found rare megalithic art.

Long before the Hell Fire Club, the summit of Montpelier Hill belonged to the dead. Two Neolithic passage tombs stood there, monuments of the same tradition as Newgrange, raised roughly 5,000 years ago on a northern shoulder of the Dublin Mountains with the whole plain of the city at their feet. The antiquarians knew what became of them. William Domville Handcock, the historian of Tallaght parish, put it flatly in 1899: "Formerly there was a large cairn on the top of Mont Pelier; but a great portion of it was utilized in building the house there. The remains of the cairn are still to be seen." The house was the work of William Conolly, Speaker of the Irish House of Commons and reputedly the richest man in Ireland. In 1723 he bought Rathfarnham Castle and its estate for 62,000 pounds from Philip, Duke of Wharton — by a neat irony, the man who had founded the original Hellfire Club in London in 1719. Around 1725 Conolly built a hunting lodge, called Mount Pelier, on the summit of the hill above his new deer park, and his builders helped themselves to the ancient cairn for stone. He had little time to enjoy it: he died in 1729, four years after it went up. Soon after construction, a storm tore off the slate roof. Conolly rebuilt it to last — an arched roof of stone, put together, as the standard accounts describe it, like the arch of a bridge. That vault is the building's signature. It has kept the lodge standing, and roofed, through three centuries of abandonment, which is why the "ruin" on the skyline reads from below as a solid black hump rather than a broken shell. The neighbourhood drew its own conclusion about the storm. When the Irish Folklore Commission sent notebooks into the schools in 1937-39, the entry from Firhouse school, in the lowlands below the hill, recorded the explanation the district still gave: "People said the Devil blew off roof because of the desecration of cairn the stones of which were used to build Hell Fire Club." The same notebook lists the building's other nicknames: "Connollys Folly", "The Kennel", "The Haunted House". The club that gave the lodge its lasting name was real, and briefly infamous. The Dublin Hellfire Club was founded around 1737 by Richard Parsons, first Earl of Rosse — described by the historian David Ryan as "a notorious libertine fond of playing outrageous practical jokes" — together with the painter James Worsdale. Its members drank hard, mocked religion and cultivated a diabolical reputation on purpose. The worst of them, Henry, fourth Baron Barry of Santry, was convicted and sentenced to death in 1739 for stabbing a servant; his connections won him a reprieve and he died in exile in Nottingham. The scandal helped finish the club, which had effectively disbanded by the early 1740s. What the record does not show is the club on the hill. Its documented meeting place was the Eagle Tavern on Cork Hill, beside Dublin Castle — in the city, not the mountains. Handcock allowed in 1899 that the tradition of meetings at the lodge "may have been founded on fact"; Weston St. John Joyce, in The Neighbourhood of Dublin (1912), was blunter, judging "it is tolerably certain that it was never one of the regular meeting-places of that mysterious and iniquitous body". A century later David Ryan, the club's modern historian, wrote after years in the archives: "I never found any evidence to definitively link the Dublin Hellfire Club with the ruined hunting lodge on Mountpelier." Popular retellings pass around a connecting thread — that after Conolly's death the lease of the lodge came to the Earl of Rosse — but the archaeologists who later dug the site state that they have found no clear demonstrable link between the club, or its principal members, and the Conolly family. At some point in the eighteenth century the interior was damaged by fire; the surviving stories about how it happened contradict one another, and tradition moves the revellers downhill afterwards, to the steward's house at Killakee. The hill's later history is quieter. Joseph Holt, a general of the 1798 rebellion, sheltered in the ruin. In 1800 the Conollys sold the lands to Luke White; through his descendants they passed to the Massy family, and when the Massys went bankrupt in the 1920s the estate fell to the State, which planted the slopes with the conifers of today's Hellfire Wood. Tradition adds one flourish along the way: for Queen Victoria's visit to Ireland in 1849, tar barrels are said to have been set alight on top of the lodge — and the stone vault shrugged off the bonfire. In October 2016 the site returned to the news for its oldest layer rather than its darkest: a community excavation led by archaeologist Neil Jackman confirmed that the mound behind the lodge is the quarried remains of a passage tomb, and recovered a polished stone axehead, worked flint, burnt bone and, against all odds, a stone bearing rare megalithic art.

Montpelier Hill is a free public forest recreation site owned by Coillte, the State forestry company, about 6.5 km south of Rathfarnham on the R115 Killakee road. The Hell Fire Club car park at the foot of the hill has around 70 spaces and a bike rack, with seasonal gates: roughly 7 am to 9 pm in summer and 8 am to 5 pm in winter (the hours published by Coillte and South Dublin County Council differ slightly, so check before a late descent — cars can be locked in). Two waymarked loops start from the car park: the Montpelier Loop (4 km, about 1 hour, moderate, climbing a broad but steep forest track to the ruin) and the Forest Loop (5.5 km, about 1.5 hours), plus three fixed orienteering courses. The summit is open and exposed, with wide views over Dublin city and bay; bring proper footwear and weather layers. The lodge itself is freely accessible but unlit, with uneven floors and low doorways — a torch helps — and there are no toilets, water or café on the hill. The long-distance Dublin Mountains Way crosses the summit, and Massy's Wood, with its own trails, lies directly across the road. Be aware of works: the Dublin Mountains Visitor Centre project (a visitor centre, a tree-top walkway to Massy's Wood and conservation works to the lodge) was upheld by the courts in 2021 and reached detailed design in 2024, with trail improvement works scheduled between January 2026 and July 2027, so expect localised closures and machinery. The hill is hugely popular at Halloween, when the car park fills early.