Lough Mahon Pile Light (lost lighthouse)
Drawing of Lough Mahon lighthouse from the wonderful corkshipwrecks.ie Cork Harbour claims to be the second largest harbour by area in the world behind Sydney. Mind you, there's a number of others queuing up to be labelled the second-largest, but that's neither here nor there. Let's just say it's big and leave it at that. Like Dublin, like Belfast, like Dundalk, the big problem for Cork in the early eighteen hundreds was that of silting. Anything larger than a rubber duck was obliged to anchor in the lower harbour and have their cargo loaded and unloaded by lighters and brought the seven miles into the docks. This was highly inefficient in terms of time and money and energy and pleased nobody except maybe the lighter owners. There was a bit of the oul' dredging going on but it was not until the Cork Harbour Board was set up around 1840 that a serious attempt was made to get these big ships all the way up the river, day or night. The main problems were ...