Dalkey

This guide to Dalkey, a seaside village outside Dublin, follows a group of bored young Dubliners who, starting around 1787, elected a mock King of Dalkey each summer and sailed him out to tiny Dalkey Island for a coronation inside a roofless medieval church. It traces the reign of a Dublin bookseller named Stephen Armitage, crowned with a string of absurd titles mocking every pompous royal style Dublin Castle could invent, at a moment when talk of revolution abroad was making the real crown uneasy. Look out from the shore here toward the island where the twenty-one-gun salute once sounded.