Rathgar in the Middle Ages was a farm belonging to the Convent of St Mary de Hogges, at present-day College Green.

[7] Rathgar is a largely residential suburb with amenities that include primary and secondary schools, nursing homes, child-care and sports facilities, and public transport to the city centre.

The housing stock largely comprises red-brick late Georgian and Victorian era terraces and much of the area lies within an architectural conservation zone.

[11] Mount Carmel Community Hospital, located on Orwell Road, re-opened as a short-stay nursing home in September 2015.

[17] The Marist Sisters have a convent at 51 Kenilworth Square[18] The embassy of the Russian Federation, including its consular office, is located on Orwell Road in Rathgar.

[21] [f]rom the back windows of the incongruously named "Yeovil" there was... a clear vista of parklike wooded country and beyond that of the complete ring of the untamed Dublin Mountains.

On any clear day one's eye could wander along that amphitheatre of beloved slopes, over Niall Glundubh's cairn on Tibradden, past haunted Kilmashogue, down into the sylvan hollows of Glendhu, up again along a red-brown fringe of leafless trees to the sinister ruins of Kilikee brooding over Dublin's south-western suburbs - "the Hellfire Club," monumental to the arrogance and violence of the eighteenth-century Irish gentry - until finally one's gaze rested upon Seefin, a pearl-grey phantasm of a mountain, its summit gleaming maybe with the snowdrifts of last week's blizzard.

And deep in those folded hills, thirty miles away, was hidden Glendalough of the Seven Churches, an enchanted place of holy gloom.