Horse Rock Pile Light, Shannon Estuary

Above and below is the Horse Rock Pile Light on the River Shannon, one of the very few totally wooden lighthouses on our coast that had living accommodation. The picture above comes from the Limerick Post in 2014;  the one below from the Sunday Independent in 1954, yet they are, of course, the same photograph.

When you look at a map of the Shannon Estuary, where it meets the sea at Loop Head, it is pretty oceanic in its width, remaining quite navigable until it passes Beeves Rock - which should be on the list of Great Irish Lighthouses (oh, wait, it has no tourism potential) - after which it slowly narrows to little more than a trickle running from a drainpipe leading to Limerick City itself. This narrow part is called 'The Narrows.' In the first half of the nineteenth century, it was falling over itself with obstacles for the unwary mariner - submerged reefs, partially submerged mudflats - and not a light in sight. Conversely the first part of the Estuary - not called The Wides, incidentally - was so full of lights that you needed sunglasses to get down it safely.

The Horse Rock was one of these obstacles. As can be seen from the beautifully arrowed map above, it was the first major obstacle after Beeves Rock and the River Fergus. As the elegantly-named Captain Mudge described it, in the 1830s, on surveying the Fergus, it was a large patch of limestone some 250 - 300 feet long which dried at low ebb. "This rock," he declared, "requires to be buoyed, for the tide sets down on it, and in light winds it is difficult to keep a vessel clear, as its position is not sufficiently defined by the rippling of the water."

This 300 feet obstacle lay roughly along the Clare - Limerick border, facing east-west. At the time, the conventional wisdom was that traffic should pass the rock to the south (the South Channel) and therefore it appears that some sort of unlit beacon was erected on the south-western shore of the rock to warn ships of the peril. The date of the erection is uncertain but my Lighthouse Bible says 1848 and who am I to argue?

It was not before the 1860s, when the Limerick Harbour Commissioners took control of the Shannon from Beeves Rock and the Fergus all the way to the City, that the idea of lighting the Narrows became a practical reality. In June 1869, a resolution was passed, directing the Board's engineer, one Mr. Long, to erect a station on the Horse Rock for the residence of a lightkeeper. 

There were a lot of pile lights erected in the Narrows at that time but Horse Rock appears to be the only one that had living quarters. The rest were all lit by lamplighters, very brave (or foolish!) men who had to row flimsy gondolas across often a rough and choppy stretch of water to light the lamp on the pile light every sunset and douse it every sunrise.

In September 1870, the living quarters were ready and "a man named Hickey from Pallaskenry' (the townland on the south (Limerick) side of the river) "was appointed keeper of the newly-erected lighthouse on the Horse Rock." (Limerick Reporter) His wages were a massive £1 per week.

 The Horse Rock beacon, stripped of its living quarters

The Munster News on 24th June 1885 reported that "A very dangerous accident has just occurred to Molony, the keeper of the Horse Rock Light on the Lower Shannon." (Evidently Hickey had made his money and was living it up elsewhere) "Whilst walking on the balcony outside the house yesterday, whilst the tide was out, he overbalanced himself and fell over onto the rocks below. He broke one of his arms, two ribs and fractured his skull and lay insensible and helpless on the stones. Were it not for a boat chanced to row by soon afterwards, he would have been drowned by the rising tide, as he was utterly able to help himself."

It is difficult to know at what stage the Harbour Commissioners decided that this outrageous outlay of money on wages could no longer be justified. In 1918, a letter was read from the lightkeepers of Horse Rock asking, "owing to the approach of winter, if they would light up the Horse Rock as usual, and added that, owing to the bad weather, the light could not be lit from the land."

(The keepers at this time were brothers Bill and Patrick Fitzgerald who used to row their 'gandalow' to and from the light every day. They were fishermen from Pallaskenry and tended the light until its demise in the 1950s.)

The Chairman replied that it had been an economy measure that the light had been cut off. The Secretary said there would be no vessels coming in, except the Steamship. There would be no grain vessels coming in. He added that they had got permission from Irish Lights to cut the light. In the end, it was unanimously decided that Horse Rock should be lighted during the winter months.

The death knell for the Horse Rock though, came in the 1950s when the light was extinguished for the last time. This was due to the changing of the route down the river from the South Channel to the North Channel. In an instant, the Horse Rock light became redundant and there was no further need for the lamplighters to make the twice-daily journey across the river. The Sunday Independent on 31st October 1954, the Sunday Independent carried a long piece about the ending of the lamplighter's trade on the Shannon. I gladly reproduce it here and apologise for the different sizing of the clips that I have pasted together!

Bill Fitzgerald

Propping the paddles against the boat, Bill and his brother strained with all their strength to keep it away from the piles. The storm raged all night but they held on grimly until the dawn when the sea calmed. They waited

And so, the pile lighthouse stood on the south channel for sixty years, watching nothing but water  and the odd canoeist flow between it and the south bank of the Shannon. Somewhere along the way it lost its living quarters but it still seemed as if it would last forever. However, it reckoned without Storm Darwin on 12th February 2014 and another little bit of maritime history was consigned to the river.

All that remains of the Horse Rock pile light, post-Darwin.

Addendum - I recently came across the photograph below, taken around 1905.