Hidden Gems of Dublin

The five actual jewels you need to see

1. An opal pendant discovered by the late Rob Murray during renovations of a mews on Northbrook Road in 1974. Murray discovered the flashy piece while removing the skirting board from a guest bedroom he’d been hired to refurbish. He mistook the mislaid heirloom for a child’s trinket (the jewellery was so ostentatious as to appear to him an obvious fake), and dropped it thoughtlessly between the cavity blocks he had just laid for a new internal wall.
2. A small but priceless collection of polished clinohumite resident in the attic of Mrs. Norah Doherty, Clonturk Park, Drumcondra. Some pieces are as large at 19mm across their widest face. The stones returned to Dublin in the suitcase of the late Pat Doherty (husband to Norah) in 1992 following his brief consultancy as a mining engineer in the Taymyr Peninsula, Siberia. The stones, imported as crystals, were cut and polished by Mr. Doherty using hobbyist equipment in his small garage and, despite their inexpert finish, represent some of the finest examples of their type in the world today. Neither Mr. Doherty, before his death, nor Mrs. Doherty, currently, are aware of the first noted discovery of gem-quality clinohumite in the early 1980s. Mrs. Doherty keeps the collection in a straw-lined cardboard box with numerous antique half-pint bottles and a number of clay bowls fired by her son during his teenage years.
3. Two small red beryl gems buried under an apple tree at the bottom of a garden on Windhill Road in Crumlin. These exceedingly rare pieces, known only to spotted locations in the New World, were taken from a drawer by Beth Doyle in New England in the summer of 1983 at the home of a wealthy family for whom she was providing temporary childcare services. Ms. Doyle returned to Dublin a few months later to being her final year in St. Patrick’s College. Between 1984 and 1986 she buried the stones in the back garden of the house in which she was lodging, for reasons still unknown.
4. A river-polished sapphire of unheralded quality set in a heavy gold ring once worn by the Bishop John Le Leche during his tenure as Archbishopric of Dublin from 1311 until 1313. The ring, for unknown reasons, failed to pass to the next bishop. It may have been buried with Le Leche, or otherwise displaced from the Cardinal’s chest, but by circuitous routes it now lies in the possession of Roisín Fitzgerald of Manor St, Stoneybatter. Ms. Fitzgerald obtained the ring from an inept antique jewellers shop in Phibsborough, where she paid fifty euro on the basis of its weight alone. It occupies a small, felted box in the bedroom of her apartment, along with the other pieces she has gathered in the three years since moving to the city from Kildare. She has been meaning to take the ring to have it professionally valued, but keeps forgetting it exists.
5. A clear, unset emerald cradled in the subterranean chest cavity of the once Larry Walsh. The stone was originally in the possession of Mrs. Cynthia Tottenham, wife of the English ambassador to Ireland in the early 1990s, and came into the possession of Mr. Walsh by way of a burglary of the ambassador’s residence—Glencairn House in Sandyford—on the night of April 4th in 1992. Security discovered Walsh moments after he had taken the stone from a jewellery box in the upstairs bedroom, and Gardaí arrived in time to give chase as the thief exited the back gate onto Quarry Road. Two hundred metres later Walsh, fleeing down an unlit wooded backroad, was struck by a passing car and had his leg broken. Trapped in the ditch, waiting for the arrival of the Gardaí, he swallowed the large gemstone in order to hide the evidence. Unfortunately he died hours later after an allergic reaction to sedatives, and was buried in Glasnevin Cemetery the following week. The emerald was never recovered.