pilgrimage: No. 10 Cedarwood Road & Mount Temple

pilgrimage is a series of essays about journeys to places where magic happened. It's about why we go there, why we want to remember, and why it's important that we do. I hope these journeys inspire you to find and make your own places. You can read the rest of the essays in the series here.

In 1984 I had bought a cheap ticket to London on a charter airline, stayed with friends who were doing their junior year abroad, and backpacked around the country. Part of this was a quick jaunt over to Ireland via the ferry from Liverpool, where I had journeyed to for obvious reasons (at least I hope if you’re a reader of this newsletter that they are obvious). In Dublin, I stayed at a woman’s residence full of girls who had come in from the countryside for school or work. I did all of the required tourist things – I saw the Book of Kells, I wandered the grounds of Trinity College, I went to historical sites like the General Post Office and Kilmainham Jail and even did a tour of the Guinness factory (even though I did not and still do not enjoy Guinness). 

But I also took my paper map into the tourist office and asked them to help me find a place called Windmill Lane. I was told there was nothing there and it wasn’t a good part of town but I thanked them and walked over there anyway, during which I was stopped at least half a dozen times by well-meaning locals who were sure I was lost. I had gotten the address – 3 Windmill Lane – off of the back of a U2 record. It’s completely gone now but at the time it was just a building.

I didn’t knock on the door because I wasn’t interested in doing that – I knew it was a place of business and not like the house the Beatles all lived in in Help! and I was just interested and curious. 

30 years later, it’s a Thursday morning in Dublin, overcast and windy. Later that night I'll see the first of two Patti Smith shows. But right now, I catch the number 9 bus at a stop just after O’Connell Street, one of the city’s main north-south arterial roads. I was heading just north of the center city to a random northern neighborhood that happens to be the location of Bono’s childhood home, located at No. 10 Cedarwood Road. 

Cedarwood Road is north of center city, not far from the airport. When you’re taking the bus from the airport into town you’ll absolutely recognize the housing stock if you saw any of the 2018 U2 shows for Innocence and Experience, when an arena-sized animated drawing of 10 Cedarwood Road was projected onto the video screen. That particular style of semi-detached house was popular and I saw it in a few places on my recent travels in Ireland. I rode the double-decker bus northward, watching my progress on Google Maps so I knew when to get off the bus. It was around 11 o’clock so outside of rush hour and so the bus was an average assortment of humans needing to get from point A to point B. There was even That Guy who needed to watch a video on his phone without headphones (although there were a lot less of those in Ireland). 

There’s a couple of other buses that go nearby or that you can get with a connection but from doing the trip planning, Number 9 was the most direct one. Even if the bus routes have changed in the intervening years, there was still definitely a main bus route that the young Paul Hewson used to have to take to get into center city to go record shopping and meet his friends and do just about anything that wasn’t going to the off-license or getting a takeaway meal. The cool stuff is not on the outer edges of the city. Your parents have moved there to get away from the heat and the noise while all you want to do at some point in your teens is run towards it.