I left my reading glasses on a pew in the nave of St Canice’s Cathedral on the final night of the Kilkenny Arts Festival, forgotten in the excitement of the rousing finale delivered by Martin Hayes and friends.

When I returned three days later, there they were, exactly where I had left them.

I felt so well disposed towards the city that I set out to explore it fully and so it was that I came across some of the immortal remains of Nelson’s Pillar arranged in a circle in the walled gardens of Butler House across the road from Kilkenny Castle.

I grew up in Clontarf, just three miles from the pillar. As a child I did manage to get lost in Clerys, but I never made it up the internal staircase of the 40-metre-high structure commissioned and paid for by Dublin’s business community. It was once the tallest Doric column in the world.

The pillar was erected in 1809 to honour the man who died four years earlier at the Battle of Trafalgar, which put paid to Napoleon’s ambitions to invade England and in which some 4,000 Irish sailors participated.

In Kilkenny, I reached out to touch one of the 16 neatly assembled stones, set in a ring of box hedges, around a reflective pool that Donald Trump would be proud of if it was only a lot larger.

The lettered stonework from the base of the pillar evokes Nelson’s most celebrated naval triumphs. Trying to guess the missing letters is like playing Wordle, but the GA can only be Trafalgar and there are hints too of the battles of Copenhagen, Cape St Vincent and the Nile.

Susan Mosse, who worked on the restoration of the 200-year-old gardens in 1999-2000, tells me that the credit for recognising the aesthetic value of the stones goes to Damian Harrington and Rudolf Heltzel, who both trained many young Irish designers during their time at the nearby Kilkenny Design Workshop.

“Damian recognised the beauty of the carving, and his father was in the building trade, so he managed to have them transported on an old truck to Kilkenny where they were stored in a shed at the back of the main building. It was thought they would make a nice feature, but at the time nothing happened,” she says.

They lay undisturbed through the demise of the Kilkenny Design Workshop and its replacement by the Kilkenny Civic Trust until Susan Mosse, designer Arthur Shackleton and landscape gardener Shane Phelan took on the task of restoring the 200-year-old gardens of Butler House as a millennium project.

“People love it,” says Mosse, “it’s truly a nice feature. It was finished on time and on budget.”

Viewing it for the first time reminded me that I had the pleasure once of working with the only man I know who could claim to have shouted “Stop the presses” in the middle of a print run.

The late Des Twomey was the night editor of the Irish Press on nearby Burgh Quay when Nelson’s Pillar was blown up at the ungodly hour of 1.30am on March 8th, 1966, and thanks to his alertness the city edition hit the streets with the news of the admiral’s demise.

I can neither confirm nor deny that the newspaper’s owner and then president of Ireland, Éamon de Valera, ever suggested the headline “British Admiral leaves Ireland by air” for the following day’s front page.

Twomey initiated me into the mysteries of newspaper production at the weekly Irish Medical Times not long after I had left the school of journalism in the old College of Commerce in Rathmines. That was where I received a grounding in the laws of libel from barrister and ex-IRA man Joe Christle, who along with his brother Mick was one of the plotters behind this astonishing act of vandalism.

The night Nelson’s Pillar fell and changed Dublin

Whenever Christle picked up his dog-eared copy of the Irish Constitution in front of our class, he would inevitably refer to it as de Valera’s prayer book. A veteran of the 1950s IRA Border campaign, it must have rankled with him to see an Englishman lording it over his native city and so he came up with the idea for Operation Humpty Dumpty.

Nelson had a great fall from his perch at the hands of a bomb planted by the late Liam Sutcliffe as he confessed to Joe Duffy on Liveline some years ago. The Army finished off the job.

Senator Owen Sheehy-Skeffington said in 1969 that “the man who destroyed the pillar made Dublin look more like Birmingham and less like an ancient city on the river Liffey – the pillar gave Dublin an internationally known appearance”.

One can argue that it set a pattern for vandalism across the city as the authorities laid waste to Georgian houses, built on the Wood Quay Viking site and sanctioned the demolition of social hubs such as the Metropole and Capitol cinemas.

Since the destruction of the pillar, the heart has been ripped out of James Joyce’s “Hibernian metropolis” and the once elegant thoroughfare is now known for crime, fast food joints, convenience food stores, gaudy neon signs and dereliction.

If you want to know what a well-preserved and loved-up urban environment looks like, visit Kilkenny.