Dubliners, fond of superlatives to describe their city, might tell you that Phoenix Park is the biggest city park in Europe. A more restrained interlocutor will add a few modifiers, telling you it’s the biggest enclosed park in any European capital.The Office of Public Works (OPW), custodian of the park since 1860, goes further, telling us it is one of the largest enclosed public parks in any capital city in Europe – although if it changed Europe to the EU it might now dispense with that first caveat.At 1,752 acres it is certainly an impressive size, if that’s what you’re after in a park; bigger than London’s Hyde Park, Regent’s Park, St James’s Park, Greenwich Park and Kensington Gardens put together, although not as big as London’s Richmond Park (hence the now potentially redundant caveat).The element of enclosure is actually crucial to the park’s history and identity and largely explains how the OPW has been able to protect the huge swathe of green space so close to the city and surrounding suburbs from development.The wall enclosing the park was first built in 1662 to form a royal deer park and hunting grounds. The fallow deer remain one of the best-known features of the park to this day.The creation of the park was essentially a political project, designed to demonstrate the “splendour of government” following the restoration of the English monarchy and the return of King Charles the second to the throne in 1660, retired chief park superintendent John McCullen tells us in his Illustrated History of the Phoenix Park.The first record of the name “Phoenix” appears a few decades earlier, in state papers dating from 1619 where “His Majesty’s House at Kilmaynham called the Phoenix” refers to a Jacobean mansion built on a height on the southern side of the park, its name a corruption of the Irish fionn-uisce.Phoenix House was demolished the following century to make way for the Magazine Fort, the army gunpowder storage facility built in 1736 that still stands and has just opened following a restoration project.Renovated exterior walls at the Magazine Fort in Phoenix Park. Photograph: Alan Betson / The Irish Times