Passage Point Perch

I have written before about the Spider Light  as it is known locally. One of the great Alexander Mitchell's screwpile lighthouses - it sits at the end of a rather nasty sandbank on the River Barrow between Passage East in county Waterford and Arthurstown in county Wexford. The light celebrated its 150th anniversary a few years ago though it was too infirm to appreciate it. 

Photo by Trabas

Alexander Mitchell was a Belfast engineer who patented the Screwpile lighthouse - basically a lighthouse on stilts that could be screwed into sandy seabeds where normal lighthouses would fear to tread. Spit Lighthouse in Cork Harbour is probably the most famous and looking pretty dandy after its relatively recent spruce-up. There is another off Moville on the River Foyle, also not looking too bad and in Dundalk Harbour, which is too far from the coast for me to ascertain its condition. Together with the forlorn Passage Point, they constitute the last remaining Mitchell pile lights remaining in Britain and Ireland.

Mitchell's system  - he was completely blind by the way from the age of 17 (reputedly from learning Greek! Let that be a lesson to you) - could also be used for building piers. The east coast of the USA is dotted with his lighthouses. There were others in Ireland, notably at the Kish - one of his rare failures - and four in Belfast Harbour. For some reason boats and ships seemed to take a dislike to these latter four and at least three were run down accidentally! But that is another story.

I have a small garden fence at home. Unfortunately, every couple of years I have to paint the bloody thing or else it will rot. Ditto my shed. Sadly, Waterford Port Authority has failed to maintain this historic lighthouse and it is now an ugly, rusting mass of iron sitting sadly up to its arse in water. The brick column has disappeared and the light has been replaced by a perch. Which brings me, in a rather long-winded manner, to the point of this article.

I had no idea when perches first came into existence for marking dangers on harbour approaches. I knew they were common in the nineteenth century. If I ever thought about them, I thought they might have been around in the late eighteenth century. Now thanks to Andrew Doherty, a local historian and author, who is the go-to authority on all things Barrow and writes the wonderfully diverse Tides and Tales blog, it seems that there was a perch at Passage Point way back in the seventeenth century.

Andrew sent me a copy of a lovely 1685 drawing of this precise area, clearly showing the perch at the end of the bank, the now defunct fort at Passage East and Duncannon Fort in the background. The drawing was by a lad called Thomas Phillips, who was sent to the area to survey the defensive capabilities of the river in case of attack.

He also managed to root out a 1787 map, also quite breathtaking in its clarity, which shows the Perch clearly marked, sitting proudly in the mud and guarding the entrance to Kings Bay, which was used as a harbour of refuge by ships winding their way up and down the river to and from Waterford. It is noteworthy that the drawing of the perch on the 1787 map corresponds very well to the description of the perch in the 1864 Report by the Port of Dublin Corporation into local lights, buoys and lighthouses in Ireland - "a pole, with barrel on top, coloured black."

It seems, therefore, that there was a perch on this spot from at least 1685 to its replacement by the Mitchell lighthouse in 1867. As Andrew says, it is rather ironic that the maritime authorities have now reverted back to a perch to guide ships away from the west bank.

As for the historic lighthouse, it seems destined to be left to its own devices, to rust and slowly deteriorate until swept away by some violent storm. Sadly, there appears to be money in the country for preserving the sexier aspects of maritime heritage - the Titanic Quarter, Wicklow old lighthouse, Spit Bank etc (and I am not for a minute begrudging these the love and care that has been lavished on them) but nothing for the workhorses that kept our coasts and rivers navigable without a second glance. I would assume the great girders of Passage Point will have to be removed at some stage. Wouldn't take too much imagination to reassemble it at, say, Hook, either as a memorial, or even an indoor space. But probably easier to scrap it...

Notwithstanding the rather bizarre band of red added to the photograph above by the Lighthouse Digest, it seems that, even comparing the photo above and the ones below, parts of the lighthouse are already starting to disappear.

 You can nearly see the new perch smirking in this recent photograph (courtesy Barony of Gaultier Historical Society) I suppose if one was in an alliterative frame of mind, one could call it the prim yet patronising Passage Point perch.

Many thanks to Caroline Ryan and Andrew Doherty for risking life and limb to obtain the very latest photographs of the dilapidated lighthouse and shiny new perch (late June 2020)