The one road

A walk though time and space with Mark Steeds, covering no less than 1,500 years of Bristols historic connections with Dublin and featuring Saints and Sinners, Roundheads and Royalists, Colonists and Criminals, Transportees and Treachery, Merchants and Murders…

From the efforts of Wulfstan in 1090 to ban the trade in Anglo Saxon slaves with the invading Vikings in Dublin, via the Easter Monday massacre of 1209 in Killin Woods, outside of Dublin, when 500 new settlers from Bristol were attacked without warning, to the futures of Irish POWs captured during the English Civil War. Mark traces the connections of Bristol merchants with invasion and forcing the Irish into labour in their homeland, then in to their plantations in the Americas and finally as penal labour transported to the ‘far side of the world’.