Work to restore Marlay Park’s so-called ha-ha wall is set to cost Dún Laoghaire Rathdown County Council €660,000 plus VAT, with the project now in its final stages.
A ha-ha is essentially an upmarket ditch historically used around large houses to separate gardens from grazing land and contain livestock without a barrier interrupting the view of the countryside. It is traditionally a sunken wall of stone or brick.
Because of its concealed nature, the name is said to have its origins in the supposed expression of surprise when someone walking the grounds realises it is there – “Ah-ha” eventually evolved into “ha-ha”.
Ha-has have featured in period literature including Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park in which a character is warned against falling into one.
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The Marlay Park wall, close to the main house, is 197m long and had fallen into disrepair. However, large sections of the original dry stone wall, built with locally sourced granite, were still roughly intact under vegetation.
A tendering process was conducted for the restoration work to include dismantling the existing wall, which was between 0.5m and 0.7m high, and its reconstruction using new stone where required, as well as work on the ditch itself.
A “foul drain” or sewer pipe that had been concealed under a more recently constructed bridge was also to be incorporated into the bank behind the rebuilt wall.
The project, which involved “specialist conservation expertise and methods”, began in April 2025, according to the council’s parks department, and ran over schedule by five months due to “a combination of factors, including the impact of the January 2025 storms, prolonged periods of wet weather, difficulties sourcing appropriate stone for the conservation works, and the discovery of unsuitable material requiring additional regulatory approvals before removal”.
It said that although the original tender price had been €625,398 excluding VAT, the final estimate with only minor works to be concluded was €660,374, also excluding VAT, an increase of almost €35,000 on the original contract value.
The Marlay Park structure is believed to have been built in the early 19th century, according to a report compiled by Architectural Conservation Professionals for the council.
Marlay Park derives its name from Elizabeth Marlay, the wife of David La Touche MP, who developed the house having bought the estate in 1764.
La Touche’s improvements amounted to “everything that wealth and taste could accomplish”, according to one observer at the time. Hely Dutton, who undertook considerable landscaping work on the estate towards the end of the 18th and start of the 19th centuries, is believed to have conceived, and perhaps built, the ha-ha.
He is said at one stage to have “accomplished eight or nine acres of catchwork [land with irrigation] at the expense of about five guineas an acre”.
