Franciscans on the hill since 1873
The Capuchin friary and St Francis College
The Capuchin Franciscans opened a friary on the Rochestown-Monkstown road in 1873, about five miles from the city. In 1884 they added a Seraphic School - effectively a junior seminary for boys who might join the order. Over the decades the school grew larger than the vocation it was meant to feed, and after the introduction of free secondary education in the late 1960s it expanded physically into the friary itself, dormitories turning into classrooms. It survives as St Francis College, a voluntary secondary school still under the trusteeship of the Capuchin Franciscan Order. Friars from the Rochestown community were among those who ministered to the leaders of the 1916 Rising, hearing confessions and giving the last rites to men sentenced to death.
Three days of the Civil War on the hill
The Battle of Rochestown, 1922
In August 1922, during the Irish Civil War, Pro-Treaty National Army troops landed in Cork Harbour and pushed inland toward the city. Anti-Treaty forces tried to hold the high ground at Rochestown, and the fighting that followed ran for roughly three days through the fields and lanes around the village. Casualties were low by the standards of the war - in the order of seven Anti-Treaty and nine Pro-Treaty dead - but for a quiet hillside suburb it was a serious engagement, and it is largely forgotten by everyone who now drives past on the way to Douglas.
A fortified house of 1624
Ronayne's Court, the oldest house near the Lee
Rochestown appears in the record early - in the Pipe Roll of Cloyne in 1385 and again in the Down Survey of 1656. Its grandest building was Ronayne's Court, a fortified residence put up in 1624 and once described as the oldest house near the River Lee. It stood into the twentieth century before it was demolished. Nothing of it survives to visit, but it is the reason Rochestown is older than the estates that now cover it.