The Grand Canal cuts through Drimnagh along the southern edge of the suburb, a stretch of water that has been here since the late eighteenth century – constructed between 1756 and 1796 as part of the canal system linking Dublin to the Shannon. Before the housing estates arrived in the 1930s, this was open farmland, dominated by Drimnagh Castle, a Norman moated stronghold held by the Barnewall family for centuries.

It is a stretch of canal with a great deal of history quietly embedded in it – and at two o’clock in the morning in 1992, a cyclist passing along the towpath encountered something that has no obvious explanation. He saw two figures dancing at the canal’s edge. One was a young man in what appeared to be a seventeenth or eighteenth century military uniform, looking, by the cyclist’s account, entirely normal – solid and present in the way a living person would be. The other was an elderly woman in white, with long hair, who glowed with a light that had no source. She was humming a tune as she danced. The cyclist did not stop. He did not look back.

No identity has been attached to either figure and no other account of this stretch of canal has come to light. The account rests on a single witness submission. Whether the military uniform connects the man to Richmond Barracks, to the Barnewall family’s long tenure on this land, or to something else entirely is unknown.