Blast from the past: Cork gardeners unearth wartime bomb shelter outside city home

Second World War-era shelter discovered during landscape works in back garden of Douglas house

Jean Walsh and her grandson Shay Walsh Murphy at the entrance to the bomb shelter with landscapers Eoin O'Sullivan and Aidan Carroll. Pictures: Dan Linehan

It is the back garden find that has shellshocked everyone.

Landscape gardeners Aidan Carroll and Eoin O’Sullivan have unearthed what they believe is a Second World War-era bomb shelter while working in the back garden of Jean Walsh's suburban Cork City home.

Ms Walsh, who bought the 1920s-built house near Douglas with her late husband, Dermot, some 48 years ago, and where they raised their family, said they always knew there was something lurking beneath their lawn.

“Some of our neighbours had heard about this house having a bomb shelter before and they thought it might still be there,” she said.

“We could see what I now know is an air vent, popping up through the lawn, but in all the time we’ve lived here, we had never seen the bomb shelter. Until now.

Landscaper Aidan Carroll looking at items that have been left in the main room of the shelter. The room behind was probably a store. 

“I’ve been told that the house was previously owned by Charlie and Mary Archer. Mary was wealthy, and her father was a former lord mayor of London, we believe.

“So maybe her British background could have been the reason for the air raid shelter in their house at the time.” 

Following the death in 2022 of her beloved husband, Ms Walsh decided to get some work done on the garden and she hired landscape gardeners Aidan and Eoin, of Monkstown-based Dkmb Homes, to do the work.

The pair had finished one side of the garden and were moving to the other side when they encountered a small dip in the lawn.

Jean Walsh and her neighbour Jerry Coughlan standing in the garden above the shelter with landscaper Aidan Carroll emerging from the shelter. 

Aidan dug a shovel into the soil to check it out, some topsoil gave way and the shovel was swallowed by the earth.

“It just disappeared. And I thought if we go down this hole, where are we going to go?” Aidan said.

“I thought we might have another Mitchelstown Cave on our hands so we brought in the mini-digger to scoop out more soil and then we unearthed the entrance to the structure, before we found the steps down to it.

"We’ve done a lot of jobs over the years and we've come across a fair few buried water pipes or electrical cables in unexpected places, and even a surprise septic tank or two, but never something like this."

Aidan ventured inside to discover a sturdy concrete block-built two-room structure with a steel reinforced roof.

One of the old bottles found in the bomb shelter. 

The structure’s floor is about 12ft beneath ground level. The shelter was covered by about 3ft of soil. The bigger room measures about 5ft by 5ft, and the smaller room is partially filled by a mound of soil which collapsed from above.

They found old medicine bottles inside but Ms Walsh believes a doll and some deflated footballs found in there may have been pushed down the air event when her children were young.

Garden air raid shelters are relatively common in parts of England.

The bomb shelter is believed to date back to the Second World War.

But domestic bomb shelters were rare in Ireland, where many believed was beyond the reach of the Luftwaffe bombers or their flying bombs, until a few stray bombs fell in Dublin, Campile and Dundalk in 1940/41.

This newspaper reported in 2007 on the sale of a “big and bounteous” six-bedroom three-storey semi-detached house in Knockrea Park, off the Douglas Road, which was built in the 1930s and owned by a former British ambassador to India, who believed his diplomatic connections might make him a target.

The shelter in this house was discovered some 60 years later when the then owners started to clear the overgrown gardens.

And in 2014, the Irish Examiner again reported on the sale of another house in the Turner’s Cross area that had its own underground air raid shelter in the back garden.

Some of the items found in the bomb shelter. 

Ms Walsh said now she has seen her bomb shelter, she plans to bury it — again.

“People are fascinated by it. But now that I’ve seen it, and we’ve taken the photographs, I think we’ll just cover it up again. I won’t fill in the rooms in case any future owner of the house wants to use it. It’s more of a curiosity really,” she said.

Aidan agrees and said: “It would take a lot to make it safe. But I think we might organise to put a time capsule of some kind into it before we bury it again.”