Santry River

Santry River ( _ga. Abhainn Seantrabh) (formerly "Skillings Glas") is a fairly small river on the north side of Dublin city, one of the forty or so watercourses monitored by Dublin City Council.

The Santry rises at an elevation of c. 80m, in the semi-rural areas of Harristown and Dubber in the part of County Dublin now administered by Fingal County Council, near the village of St. Margaret's and Dublin Airport. One branch can be found at the end of a small lane in the former Harristown Demesne, now cut off by new road development. The river then flows along to the south of Dublin Airport (from which some tributary streams enter it), near the new Dublin Bus Harristown depot. It passes for most of its course out in the open, flowing through Sillogue Public Golf Course and then more of Ballymun, then Santry, where it forms a major feature of the Santry Demesne, with small lakes within the public park.

In Coolock, the river forms a central feature, and features ornamental ponds, running past the Stardust Memorial Park, and through the grounds of Cadbury's, where there is an EPA monitoring station. It then enters Raheny just below Tonlegee Road, flowing alongside Edenmore lands, past St. Joseph's Hospital, then through the village centre, along the grounds of Manor House School, and then, with two areas of culverting, at the beginning and end of the Bettyglen Estate, reaches the sea, where its mouth forms part of the eastern "lagoon" behind North Bull Island, and the flow enters Sutton Creek.

The dotted line on the above sketch is an artificial link made by Dublin Corporation between the Santry River and the Naniken River, to reduce the flow of the latter and to allow handling of any flooding in either watercourse. As part of the management of the river, the Santry is one of the third tier rivers being numerically mapped within the Greater Dublin Strategic Drainage Study, with floodplain hydraulics computed (the other rivers being the Carrickmines, Deansgrange, Poddle, Camac, Finglas and Mayne, along with one of the two second tier waterways, the Tolka).

The Santry has been noted for pollution incidents over the years, with industrial effluent and building material the most common causes (some of the latter once caused the main pond by the Stardust Memorial to be drained and reformed).

References

* Dublin, Dublin Corporation, 1991: The Rivers of Dublin, Clair L. Sweeney.
* Dublin, Dublin City Council, Raheny Branch Library: Local History File
* Dublin, Dublin Corporation and contractors, 2002 et seq: The Greater Dublin Strategic Drainage Study.