In a kitchen at the southern edge of County Dublin, a few minutes from the Wicklow border, there is a photograph of Daniel Day-Lewis at a long refectory table. The room is in a private house, one of ten packed into the stable yard of a country house at Rathmichael, and the photograph reached print in 2017 only because the house was for sale.
7
places on the route
Two of the places stand four hundred metres apart at Arbour Hill — switch to Dublin with the buttons above. Click a point to jump to its entry.
Christy Brown's Dublin and this film's Dublin barely touch. He grew up and wrote on Stannaway Road, and nothing was shot on it: the coal-lorry scene was taken three kilometres north at Arbour Hill, which plays Kimmage instead. The hospital interiors are in an army hospital on the same hill. The domestic interiors are in that stable yard, sixteen kilometres out of town. Most of the rest, by two accounts, was made on a stage in Bray. The last two places on this page were not filming locations at all: a maternity hospital, and the road the crew never came to.
filmed herewhere it really happened
The courtyard where the film-makers lived
Old Conna Village, Ferndale Road, Rathmichael, County Dublin
Interiors, in the one place on this map where the people who lived there were the people making the picture. The stables, the forge and the outhouses of Old Conna House were converted into ten dwellings around a courtyard. Two of the ten have been named in print as rooms the film used: The Long House, which the producer Noel Pearson sold in the early 1990s, and The Coach House, which belonged to Peter Sheridan, the director's brother. All three mentions sit in the property pages of the Irish Times, in pieces about houses for sale between 2005 and 2017. Which scenes, and in which rooms, none of them says.
Nothing here is open to anyone. The yard is reached through the old stable archway at the end of a tree-lined avenue behind electric gates, and the ten houses are homes. The pin means the courtyard rather than a door.
One sentence in the 2017 article hangs three more productions on the same yard: Zardoz, Braveheart and the television series The Irish R.M. It also puts Sean Connery, in his Zardoz costume, on the patch of ground the residents now use for the children's Halloween bonfire. Nothing else we read attaches any of the three to a particular house here.
The big house whose stables these were, Old Conna House, also called Aravon, was sold by the songwriter Chris de Burgh to John Scottus School in 2016. Three hundred metres up the same road stands Old Connaught House, Georgian, dated 1784, now fifty apartments. It is a different building, and it is the one that gets named on user-submitted location lists for this film.
Four hundred metres at Arbour Hill
St Bricin's Military Hospital, Arbour Hill, Dublin 7
The National Library of Ireland published this as an institutional building in an unknown location. Readers of the library's photostream named it as the hospital at Arbour Hill and dated it to about 1910.
Photo: National Library of Ireland on The Commons · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
The hospital interiors, and the two sources that name the building give the same reason for the choice: nobody had modernised the wards. Long ward rooms with a dayroom at the sunny end of each, corridors with round-headed windows down both sides. The Royal Engineers built it in stages from 1902 for the British garrison, it opened in 1913 as the King George V Hospital, and the Free State army took it over in 1922.
This is Defence Forces ground, with no way in. Archiseek, the architecture reference that names the film, now calls the building the former hospital, and the location blog that also names it says the medical work has gone to the Curragh in County Kildare; the encyclopaedia entry still uses the present tense. Archiseek says film crews have been through the interior many times, and then names only this one. The rest of that list we did not find.
The coal-lorry scene: the Browns have no coal, Christy works out how to get some, and his brothers do the carrying. Four hundred metres downhill from the hospital, and three kilometres north of the street the family actually lived on. Arbour Hill is playing Kimmage.
One person made this identification, on a blog about the places in a Dublin crime series set around Stoneybatter, and he did it by putting frame grabs beside his own photographs of the same walls. He listed what had moved on since: the railings behind Collins Barracks are painted another colour now, waste ground along the street has been built on, the Ashling Hotel has gained a large extension, and the newer flats carry satellite dishes and washing lines. The low cottages on Montpelier Hill are where they were. His own headline says Arbour Hill and his own text corrects it, to the corner where Temple Street West and Temple Villas run into Montpelier Hill. The pin follows the correction.
Collins Barracks itself is the decorative arts and history site of the National Museum of Ireland now, and the Luas red line runs along the bottom of the hill.
The pub that keeps a list
Mulligan's, 8-9 Poolbeg Street, Dublin 2
Mulligan's, 8-9 Poolbeg Street, Dublin, in May 2007.
Two published guides put the film in this pub, and one of them describes the scene: the father drinking alone over his son, and later bringing Christy in and standing him a drink for having learned to write. Both were written long after the event and neither comes from the production side.
Mulligan's keeps its own account of this sort of thing. The site built around the book about the pub runs a section for productions that have used the premises, and this film is not in it. What is in it is a picture from the Irish Press of 11 May 1976: Joseph Strick inside the pub, directing a scene for his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, with the actors Danny Cummins and Bosco Hogan, who played Stephen Dedalus. The best-documented shoot in this room belongs to somebody else's film.
There has been a pub on the site since 1854 and the licence behind it dates from 1782, the oldest in Dublin. The old Theatre Royal stood across the road until it came down, which is why the walls are papered with playbills.
Bray: a house and a stage
Killruddery House, Southern Cross, Bray, County Wicklow
What the film did here nobody has written down. One source puts it in the house at all, a 2025 piece in the Bray People about the filming locations of Wicklow, and the sentence that carries it also carries Excalibur, Far and Away, Angela's Ashes, The Tudors and Camelot. Those five are worth exactly what ours is worth. The house has a website and no page on it about filming.
The Brabazon family, Earls of Meath, have held Killruddery since 1618. The Elizabethan-revival front and the domed conservatory came out of a rebuilding in the 1820s. The formal garden behind, with its twin canals, is seventeenth-century, and the oldest garden of its kind still in existence in Ireland. The house and the gardens take visitors, there is a farm shop and a café in the grain store, and the family lives in it.
Ardmore Studios, Herbert Road, Bray
There is no pin on this page for a sound stage, and this is where most of the film was made. Turner Classic Movies puts the shoot at nine weeks, split between Dublin and Ardmore. Wicklow's tourism board says the majority of it was done at the studio. The lot had been shut in effect at the start of the 1980s, when government funding was withdrawn, and it reopened under Tara Productions with MTM; the studio's own history takes this film as the marker of its return.
That same Wicklow page sends you to Bray's back streets, and to Wicklow Head forty kilometres further south, without naming a street or a scene between them. It also calls Christy Brown by the name of a folk singer.
Where it really happened
The Rotunda Hospital, Parnell Square, Dublin 1
The Rotunda Hospital, Parnell Street, Dublin, September 2006.
Christy Brown was born here on 5 June 1932, and the 1954 memoir the film takes its name from opens by saying so. The Rotunda opened in 1745 and is still delivering babies, which by its own account and the encyclopaedia's makes it the oldest maternity hospital in continuous operation anywhere. The assembly rooms next door to it are the Gate Theatre and the Ambassador.
The same user-submitted lists that get Rathmichael wrong put a film crew in here as well. Nothing we read supports it. This pin is for the birth.
Sandymount, Dublin 4
Brown was taught, on and off, at St Brendan's School-Clinic in Sandymount. Robert Collis, the doctor who found him and got his writing published, worked there. Day-Lewis spent weeks at the cerebral palsy clinic in Sandymount before the shoot and came back afterwards with his Oscar.
There is no pin, because the chain breaks at the last link. Collis founded the organisation in 1948; by the early 1950s its clinic, by then in Sandymount, had become the first school in Ireland for disabled children; the organisation is Enable Ireland now, and its Sandymount school stands on Sandymount Avenue. No source says in one sentence that the building on Sandymount Avenue today is the room Christy Brown sat in.
The terraced house he grew up in and wrote in. Sources put the road in Kimmage and in Crumlin, and it runs along the line between them. Nothing in the film was shot on it.
A garden opened across the road on 5 June 2026, ninety-four years to the day after he was born: five granite flagstones cut with lines from his poetry and his prose, his signature cast in bronze, native planting, designed by the artist Clodagh Emoe. The neighbours had been campaigning for it since 2021. Jim and Peter Sheridan came to the opening. Daniel Day-Lewis sent a letter.
The garden has no coordinate of its own yet. The pin here is the house, which is the address every account of him gives. The kitchen with the photograph of Day-Lewis at the refectory table is sixteen kilometres south-east of here, behind electric gates. This one you can walk into.
