The story of Ballycotton lighthouse

I am delighted that this blogpost is not from myself, not simply because I'm very lazy, but because it is by someone who is sickeningly young.

Ciaran Newcombe is a student in Transition Year in Christian Brothers College in Cork City. He is 16 and he undertook this research into Ballycotton lighthouse for the Cork Heritage Project led by Kieran McCarthy, former Lord Mayor of Cork. Ciaran is at pains to point out that the drone footage is not his, but the research, narration and editing is all his own work.

As well as the video, he also produced a 28 page pdf on Ballycotton lighthouse, which is full of interesting facts on its history, fogbell, wrecks etc. I'm not sure why I'm mentioning this because I haven't managed to figure out a way of displaying a pdf on this page.

A tale of ancient times in Sligo

Knocknarea from Strandhill

In the west of Ireland in the modern-day county of Sligo, there stands a mountain overlooking Sligo Bay called Knocknarea. It is an energetic walk to the top from Strandhill near the coast and the top of the mountain is covered in a huge mound of stones, said to hide the tomb of Queen Maeve, famous for her cattle-raiding exploits.

The Shanachies had a story about Knocknarea which must pre-date Queen Maeve, who was said to have lived in the 300s AD, about a century before St Patrick. At the time, the native Irish had been joined by two separate bands of settlers, one small and dark from the southern latitudes; and the other tall and blonde who had arrived from the north. I can't vouch for this because I wasn't around at the time. Both of the immigrant tribes built settlements on the coast and all three lived relatively peacefully together.

The native Irish at the time still worshipped the sun. The settlers worshipped their own gods, or maybe none but their differences were tolerated in the name of peace, love and understanding. Until the love part of the trilogy became threatened.

Once a year on midsummer's day, the native Irish held a ceremony on top of Knocknarea, upon which four groves marked the points of the compass, marking out a flat square, in the middle of which stood the Stone of Sacrifice. All the sun-priests were obliged to attend and all the local people too. Non-attendance meant your crops would fail and your cattle would die. Some of the people were starting to wonder why their crops failed and cattle died whether they turned up or not, but they always attended, in much the same way that I always say 'Good Morning, Mr Magpie' every time I see one of those blasted birds. Just in case, just in case. And their faith was not helped by the settlers taking the piss out of them when their crops failed anyway.

Queen Maeve's tomb on top of Knocknarea, from an old postcard

The highlight of the ceremony was the sacrifice of a local virgin upon the Stone of Sacrifice. This was done by the High Priest, probably dressed in a robe and black cowl, with fanatical eyes and a name like Blackie or Evil Pete. He used a sharp knife heated in the sacrificial fire.
This particular midsummer, the girl selected for the honour was called Eilith and she was the daughter of the Chief of Cuil Irra. Not only that but she was in love with the head of one of the Northern tribes who had settled in the locality, a man called Finn the Fearless, which must have been quite the alliterative cliché, even in those days. Naturally, he was tall and strong and handsome and a brave leader of men.

No longer worshipped in Ireland, the sun now rarely bothers to put in an appearance

As the sun began to set, the High Priest appeared from an underground passage with Eilith. He threw her onto the stone, laughed demonically and then began to walk around her, chanting incantations as he did so, like Christopher Lee in Hammer Horror films. His lips curled into a satanic grin and his cruel eyes glinted in the growing darkness. He raised the blazing knife high above his head, preparing to plunge it into Eilith's untouched body when, a shout arose, and Finn and fifty men leapt out from other underground passages. Finn drew a bow and let loose an arrow at the High Priest's heart. A look of pure hatred flashed across his face, a second before he fell down dead. The rest of the priests fled. The onlookers clapped, maybe thinking it was part of the performance. Finn's men tied cowhides around the Stone of Sacrifice and dragged it to the edge of the mountain and rolled it off. It crashed to the ground far below, turning into thousands of Pebbles of Sacrifice. Finn snatched up Eilith and they embraced, silhouetted against the setting sun, as the credits began to roll.

Ascending Knocknarea from the North

Eilith's oul' feller, the Chief, was quite happy with the outcome. Eilith and Finn got married and went to live in Finn's gaff, right on the coast at the end of a stone road on the far side of Coney Island. It was the only stone house in the settlement because Finn was the chief. They had about a thousand children, the girls all ravishingly beautiful like their ma, the boys all fearless warriors like their da. Finn and Eilith lived long, happy lives, never quarrelling once, and when they died, they were buried in the Giant's Grave, which today lies just outside the gates of Sligo Airport. 

And, many hundreds of years later, long after Finn and Eilith's house had succumbed to rising tides, another stone edifice was built in the exact same spot where they had lived. 

Blackrock lighthouse.

Blackrock lighthouse c.1925 with Ben Bulben behind

Photo by marinas.com showing the 'stony road' down which Finn and Eilith used to drive home when the water levels were lower.

The lighthouses at Bearna

 

The good residents of Bearna (or Barna), some five miles west of Galway city, will doubtless recognise the picture above, even though its quite some time since this P. Philips sketch was commissioned. Couples still promenade along the elegant east pier to the smaller lighthouse, gazing across at the barques and brigs and quinquiremes of Nineveh lined up along the west pier outside the magnificent Midland and Great Western Train Station. They admire the ornate gas lamps along the mile-long pier, wish passers-by 'Good morning' and maybe listen to the chatter emanating from the far quay with its passengers bound for Amerikay. 

But mostly they will gaze in awe at the incredible, stately lighthouse that adorns the west pier, wondering, possibly, how the pier wall could possibly withstand such weight. Towering above the harbour like the Pharos of Alexandria, it has become one of the wonders of the modern world, worth a minimum five stars on Trip Advisor, a tourist destination in its own right. Up above on the balcony, a cheery keeper doffs his cap to indicate a hearty 'top o' the morning' to one and all.

The plans above (which bear a close resemblance to those of Dun Laoghaire harbour) date from the early years of last century, when Bearna was yet again proposed as the major port for journeys westwards across the Atalanticle Ocean. Blacksod and Wesport in Mayo, Limerick and Valentia in Kerry had also been mooted and great plans and notions occupied many minds for well over a century.

Unfortunately (or maybe not) for Bearna, it never happened. Despite millions being invested in the project, the difficulty of leasing the necessary land and the withdrawal from the scheme by the railway meant that the plans were dead in the quite deep water by 1916. So no trips to Bearna for lighthouse enthusiasts like myself.

Lighthouseless Barna pier today

However, not many people are aware that Bearna did once have a lighthouse. Saunders Newsletter from 8th November 1784 reported that the local bigwig, Mr Lynch, had just finished building an elegant pier on his lands at Bearna and had gone to wash his hands. It was large enough for 'one hundred fmall fail of fifhing boats', which is not easy to say while eating  a boiled egg. 

Fast forward in the Tardis to 1837 when a fisheries report described its history. It had been built by the father of the present proprietor, it said, and had extended some 470 feet and had a lighthouse on the head. It also had an inner dock totalling around 620 feet. The pier had been slightly damaged (some trifling injury) at one time but this had led to its total destruction in a storm one night, due to it not having been repaired.

By 1837, the pier had been partially rebuilt to 300 feet but there was no mention of the lighthouse. I imagine its still a nice walk in the summer, particularly without the noise of trains disgorging westward bound families onto the quay.

(photo Brian Nolan)

The White Lady and the White Man

Mr and Mrs White. Please note the blue sky, which is quite the rarity for this blog. Photo taken from up on the Sky Road on the other side of the channel 

I've written about these two Connemara lovers before, gazing longingly at each other but I never got a picture of the two of them together.
The near beacon is the White Lady. She sits at the end of the promontory that marks the southern entrance to Clifden Bay, near a lovely, quiet little harbour of Errislannan and a beach full of the most perfectly rounded stones I've ever seen. Incidentally, the name Errislannan (Iorras Fhlannáin) is derived from the same saint, Flannan, who gave his name to the island and lighthouse in Scotland from where three lightkeepers mysteriously disappeared at the start of the twentieth century.

The White Lady's exact location is known as Fishing Point, probably because the fishing is supposed to be good there. Incidentally, one monologue from the beginning of the twentieth century calls her the Metal Man, which is only inaccurate on two counts. I haven't found any other instance of this name.
The beacon further out, known as the White Man, marks the Seal Rocks or Carrickrana, a reef that stretches a good half a mile and sits from six to twenty feet above high water. The beacon sits on the southeastern end of the cluster. Although they seem identical, it seems as though the top of the Lady is pointier than the Man.

The pointy-headed Lady ...

...and the flat-headed Man

In July 1876, the Commissioner of Irish Lights posted a notice for tenders for construction of the two beacons. On the 20th August 1877, a Notice to Mariners was issued, saying that two white stone (not metal) beacons had been erected to better mark the entrance of Clifden Bay. It also states that the Seal Rock beacon was thirty-six feet tall and placed on the southernmost part of the reef at a spot six feet above the high water mark. The NTM was reticent about the dimensions of the beacon at Fishing Point and makes no reference to the sex of either. 

Yet they've been gazing at each other for 147 years...

The White Man at Carrickrana. Does it look like the he is sitting on a bridge like the house at Ambleside? Photo Graham and Dairne at World of Lighthouses

The goats of Inishtearaght

 

Aside from humans, the two animals that were deliberately imported to Tearaght were rabbits and goats. All three were probably introduced at the same time. The rabbits were the rare Silver Grey variety and were a great boon, particularly at Christmas in an age where rabbit far superceded fowl as a Christmas and Sundays dish. They appear to have survived for 150 years though latterly there have been concerns for their existence. Puffins find it easy to evict rabbits from a basic burrow, so they only really survive in well-constructed burrows, and even then the gulls and ravens kill many of the young.

A pair of milking goats were introduced onto the island in 1870, the year of the lighthouse's establishment. In Beam 12/1 (roughly 1981), Dr. Gerald A Watson of UCC talked about the goats. He said that from this originally pair, roughly 35 goats had been spawned by 1895. (I'm not great on zoology or, indeed, the reproductive system, but would 'milking goats' not need to be female?)

Photo Joe O'Brien 2024

His point was that, although goats might be a good source of fresh milk and, in dire straits, food, they were not great for the ecosystem. They ate all the grass on the island and had become a terrible nuisance. Up until that year, hay had been imported annually, but from 1895 this practice ceased and there was a massive cull of the goats. At least 20 were transferred to nearby Inis Mhic Aoibhleáin (Charlie Haughey's island) but many more were slaughtered.

(A completely different account was given by a young girl, Annie O'Leary, in a letter to the Weekly Irish Times about a bad storm in 1894 - "It was a terrible destruction. the houses were washed nine feet with sea, also the lighthouse. All the goats out of forty died of starvation, because the grass was swept off with the gale, and 31 kids, all but one little kid, her name was Gin.")

John McCarron, son of lightkeeper Edward, spent four years as a child on Tearaght in the 1880s. Writing sixty years later, he remembers the 30 or so goats, which provided milk for most of the year, being supplemented  with condensed milk.

Whatever about the demise of the goats, it appears that the herd was regularly culled to keep the numbers to around twelve. Sometimes a retiring keeper might be given a gift of one. Rounding the goats up for milking was a hazardous occupation - keeper Denis Carroll plunged to his death in 1913 engaged on this task.

Photo Joe O'Brien 2024

1951 was the watershed year for the goats. Three things happened: -

1. A fridge arrived on the island
2. Two non-climbing keepers were transferred there and
3. Tinned and dried milk became available. (One wonders how they packaged the condensed milk in the 1880s)

As a result, little interest was taken in the goats and, by 1956, when Eugene Gillen returned to the island, he could not believe the destruction done there. With the grass eaten, the soil was no longer anchored to the rock and had been blown to the four winds. Again, a cull had to be undertaken.

There were 12 goats on the island in 1974 and the same when Dr Watson arrived to study the microculture of the island. He said he saw a group of goats working in tandem with their hooves to dig up half an acre of ground to get at the roots of the white sea campion. The resulting loss of soil and the calcium therein was extremely detrimental to the eco-culture of the island, he said. The goats in the winter probably survived, like the reindeer of the frozen tundra, on lichen.

In Blasket Spirit (2009), Anita Fennelly stated that 'the keeper's nanny goat, who used to chase Paud O'Connor every time he returned to the island, is dead.' Whether she knew that for a fact or was only surmising, I have no idea.

The humans are gone. The rabbits may survive. Are the goats still there? I doubt it. But maybe someone can set the record straight.

1906 Commissioners' inspection (NLI)

The old Dun Leary pier light (lost lighthouse)

 

There has been a harbour at Dún Laoghaire, then called Dunleary, since medieval times, though this would have been used only by small fishing boats. In later years, from at least as early as the 17th century, some passenger boats called in at the harbour to avoid the difficulties of accessing Dublin port. By the 18th century, some forty coal boats were trading with ports in England and to facilitate this a new pier was built in the 1760s, supervised by the military engineer, Charles Vallancey. The pier that commenced in 1817 had no connection with the old harbour at Dunleary, however, but was designed solely as a means of providing shelter for the safety of shipping during major storms. The port of Dublin was difficult to access due to a sand bar that ran across the mouth of the Liffey and, as there was nowhere else in Dublin Bay capable of sheltering ships, there were hundreds of wrecks in the bay over the centuries.

As stated, the 1760s pier was often frequented by coal boats coming from South Wales and thus became known as the Coal Pier. In the 1st edition OS map above (1843?) it is clear that it was situated near to the start of the West Pier. There had been a Martello Tower nearby as well. The Coal Pier had also been prone to silting too, prior to the building of the new harbour and was also known as the Dry Pier. It is still there today.

The above map from 1813 shows the old harbour prior to the commencement of work on the East and West piers. The Martello Tower can be clearly seen. Apparently there was a light on the end of the old pier, though whether it dated back to the building of the pier in the 1760s, or had been originated in the early 1800s, is uncertain. Nor do we know what sort of light it was, or the fuel used or the tower that housed it. All that we know for certain is that, when the East Pier reached out further to sea than the old pier, the light on the end of the old pier was discontinued.

The plate at the top of the page is dated 1st January 1799. Did the pier have a light at this stage? When you zoom in on the roundel at the end of the pier though, it shows a man holding a stick and the other arm indicating the way into the harbour. Whether its a real man or a statue is difficult to ascertain, but it does remind me of the Metal Man in Tramore and Sligo!

The Inishowen Maritime Museum (and Planetarium)

The Foreland buoy which once sat at the entrance of Belfast Lough. There is/was a Foreland Buoy sitting outside the Mizen Centre in county Cork for many years. I have no idea if this buoy is the same one, and it has been transferred to Greencastle, or another one

The price to pay for getting to see the lighthouses on Inishtrahull was a long journey up and a long journey back. Landing back at Bunagee Pier in beautiful sunshine, I was half minded to drive straight back and get it over with but decided that I had long wanted to see the Inishowen Maritime Museum in nearby Greencastle and God only knew how long it would be before I was up this way again.

I have to say, I made the right decision. The Museum is situated on the front at Greencastle, looking out over the harbour. Don't take the road to the harbour if the ferry to county Derry is in or you'll end up blocked in. Take the little road to the front a couple of hundred yards south and turn left!

For many years, I used to dread museums. Boring. Rather be out playing football. But now, it appears I am actually growing up, at least in this aspect.
The museum is small, on two floors. Plenty of reading, plenty of exhibits. I particularly liked the Greencastle yawl and would have liked to read more about it, as it seems every stretch of coastline in Ireland had its own style of boat but the long journey beckoned and I went upstairs to the lighthouse section.

It contained quite a number of exhibits, including semaphore bats, which I'd only ever seen pictures of. There were photographs of local keepers at Shroove and information about them. I learned that a keeper called JJ 'Sean' Doherty also worked on Eagle Island in 1987-88. Good job I hadn't finished that book. There were parabolic reflectors and racons and sun valves and a fog signal timing mechanism and other pieces of equipment I didn't really understand. But it was nice to put a face on the name.

Outside there was a Tunn's Buoy Lantern Unit, various buoys, a mushroom anchor thingy and a bell buoy. 

The only thing that disappointed me was that I was the only person in the place. I mentioned it to the girl on the desk and she said it was maybe a combination of the good weather and the All-Ireland Final. Normally on a Sunday its busier, she said. For €6, it was great value for money and the next time up, whenever that may be, I'll certainly spend more time there.

By the way, I never got to see the planetarium, but doubtless it's full of interesting planets.