Brews In The Woods

Class

ack when GG was full of hope and booze, it was Cresswells, up behind the Murtagh’s place on Bellevue Hill.

A long-abandoned house with a natural party pit in the overgrown grounds was the ideal spot to let your teenage stupidity run wild.

Mainly because it was a good mile from anyone’s house, and given that it was our regular hang-out spot, we kept it relatively nice agus tidy.

We were party house proud, man.

Which would appear not to be the case down behind the Woodlands estate right now, as regular sessions with the town’s young leaders of tomorrow leaving more than a box of Milk Tray behind when they scarper the following morning.

For the local residents, it’s starting to prove a little too much. As this one anonymous source explains…

The teenagers started congregating in the forest behind Woodlands estate during the summer this year. They mostly come across the IDA lands entering through the open gate along Mill Road.

But as the months passed the residents started to notice groups of them wondering down the cul de sacs within the estate and then disappearing over the wall into the forest. As the weeks passed, the numbers arriving increased and the noise gradually ramped up. They have taken sofas and trampolines into the woods and left them there to rot – the entire length of the woods is now littered with debris and it has blown out across the fields.

There is also an opening along the side of the sewage works that leads from the driving range road past the estate into the forest. In September they set fire to the boundary of the driving range with fireworks and the weekends leading up to Halloween there was a constant sound of fireworks being let off behind the houses.

The Gardaí are called every Saturday, they arrive and head in to them but the kids disperse across the fields. The Gardaí have told the residents to keep calling them but because there are so many entry and exit points, the kids just run and then return once the Gardaí have gone.

It’s annoying for the residents to watch gangs of kids wandering through the estate, but for the houses beside the forest its unbearable, as the noise ramps up from Saturday afternoon to Saturday night. It appears that they send out the info on social media and kids from Bray and Kilcoole are now also arriving.

There are ways to party, of course, where you leave both stones unturned and no trace. Which is why Cresswells was Delgany’s party central for over ten years…