A blog about Irish Lighthouses past and present and other selected maritime beacons and buoys of interest. If anybody has any corrections or additional info on any post, please use the comment section or the email address on the right.
Muglins Lighthouse, Dalkey, co. Dublin
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The top picture is not mine. The bottom picture is how near to it I could get. The land in front of it is another island. This is really more a light than a lighthouse.
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I am indebted to Redmond O'Brien - how much more Wexfordian can you get? - for alerting me to the unusual green buoy marking the danger of the Ballast Bank situated in Wexford harbour. For some reason, this light does not appear on Trabas, one of the very few omissions I have come across in that wonderful resource. In fact, I have found nothing online about the light. Regarding the Ballast Bank, itself, it is an artificial island, constructed so that ships might pick up or discharge ballast on entering or leaving Wexford Harbour. Most sources give the date of construction as 1937, though the architecture of Ireland site - which really should have the inside track on these sort of things - dates the island back to 1831. I'm no expert, but the light itself seems older than 1937. Someone should bring it in to the Antiques Roadshow. Below, a drone's eye view of the island, which I filched from Wexford Hub, an excellent site about all things Wexford.
I was contacted recently by a very nice guy called Nick from Holywood, county Down. Nick makes beautiful short films recording the Ireland that he sees around him, from winter scenes to lakes and forests, skies, whatever captures his interest. He had become interested in lighthouses (there are a good few in his part of our coast!) and was wondering if I'd do a voice-over for a lighthouse film. Now I'm a stammerer and was hesitant (pun intended) but Nick is the type of feller who can make a silk purse out of a sow's ear and he has made me sound almost fluent. I'm not sure the piece was supposed to be about me but that's how it's turned out.
When this blog started, many moons ago, it was a simple 'visit a lighthouse, take a photo or two and add a bit of info' sort of a blog. For better and worse, it has become much more historically minded and the need to have visited has gone. So it is something of a breath of fresh air to get out and actually visit an Irish lighthouse I had never seen. So, an unexpected free day at the start of September, saw me up early and driving across the country to south-west Donegal to bag the last of the easily baggable lighthouses. I could have taken a boat tour and got pretty close to Rotten Island but the distance from the mainland seemed minimal. Basically, I got to Bruckless and, with the help of Google Maps, headed for the Atlantic View B & B, which ended at a stony beach. Parking up (making sure I left a gap for any boat-laden cars to get through) the lighthouse was visible from the beach (see next photo) The tide was low so I walked up the beach towards the lighthouse, eventua...
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