Ranelagh ( , ; ) is an affluent residential area and urban village on the Southside of Dublin, Ireland in the postal district of D06. History The district was originally a village known as Cullenswood just outside Dublin, surrounded by landed estates. On Easter Monday in 1207, a celebrating group of English inhabitants of Dublin were attacked here by Irish raiders from county Wicklow. Three hundred people were said to have been killed. In the 1520s and 1530s Cullenswood was held by the de Meones family, who also owned, and gave their name to, nearby Meonesrath, now Rathmines. In the early years of the Irish Confederate Wars (1641–1649), the area was the scene of skirmishes culminating in the Battle of Rathmines in August 1649. After the Irish united with the Royalists against the Parliamentarians, an attempt was made to take Dublin. Their army under Ormonde was defeated, many of them killed, and the place where they fell (mainly between Rathmines and Ranelagh) was known for a long time as the Bloody Fields. The area was incorporated into the expanding city in the 19th century, after which massive development took place. The locality became known as Ranelagh when a popular entertainment venue (now a public park) was established about 1770 and named Ranelagh Gardens after a similar venture of the same name in Chelsea, London. The Gardens were opened in 1766 by William Hollister, a London organ-builder. (The model and the name were also copied in other cities, including Liverpool, New York and Paris). The original Ranelagh Gardens in Chelsea was built on the site of Ranelagh House, the London home of the Jones family, who took their title (Earl of Ranelagh) from lands in County Wicklow that had belonged to Fiach McHugh O'Byrne sometimes described as Lord Ranelagh, because he was head of the Gabhal Ragnaill branch of the O'Byrne clan. In 1785, only two years after the first manned flight in history, Richard Crosbie successfully flew in a hot air balloon from Ranelagh Gardens to Clontarf. The 225th anniversary of his flight was commemorated with a balloon flight from the same gardens on 23 January 2010 although due to adverse weather the balloon did not take off. In the 1970s and 1980s, areas of Ranelagh were bought up with the intention of developing the sites as office space, during a boom period of such construction in the wider city.