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Feeling Ballsy? Explore The Hell Fire Club Today
Published 00:10 20 Dec 2016 GMT
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Published 00:10 20 Dec 2016 GMT
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Weekends were made for adventures, so why not take to the Dublin Mountains to visit one of the most iconic old ruins we have. The Hellfire Club sits on top of Montpelier Hill 390 meters above Dublin city, and it has plenty of eerie history surrounding it. It's the kind of place that you always wanted to camp out at during your teenage years, but generally chickened out picturing Blair Witch-esque scenes up there. However, provided you make it up there during daylight hours you'll hopefully escape unscathed.
The history behind the Hell Fire Club is really what makes it so iconic though. It was originally built in 1725 as a hunting lodge for for a Speaker of the Irish House of Commons, William Connolly. As the story goes, when he passed away in 1729 the lodge was taken over by an unruly young man who'd been banned from every public house in the city. From then on the Hell Fire Club became a location where hedonistic behaviour was encouraged and welcomed, and it was a hot bed for all sorts of illegal activity such as drinking, gambling and satanism.
The stories from the following centuries suggest that there are in fact some bad spirits inhabiting the place (if you're one to believe that kind of thing!). People talk about their dogs act strangely as soon as they near the lodge, others have commented that there is a constant smell of burning within the environs of the building, as well as claims that people have seen ghosts or the devil himself late at night up there. Now, whether you buy into any of that stuff or not, it's still a pretty cool story behind the building. The Hell Fire Club's motto was 'Do as you will' so if you're feeling like it, why not head up there for a bit of a walk today and have a bit of a look around? Just make sure you get home before the sun goes down, because you can never be too careful...
