Pete's Irish Lighthouses

It's kind of like having a superstar living on your street. No matter how great and wonderful you may be, you're always going to be overshadowed by the national celebrities. Thus is the lot of Wicklow Pierhead lighthouse, forced for all eternity to listen to the endless tributes to the three bigshot lighthouses on nearby Wicklow Head, each of them older and taller and brighter than the mere 130 year old harbour light sitting modestly at the end of Wicklow's East Pier. Like many east coast settlements, fishing has been going on at Wicklow for centuries. The Vikings arrived and set up a base upriver from the coast and maritime trade slowly grew the village into a small town, despite the presence of the sandbanks that run parallel to much of the country's east coast. In the 1840s, royal assent was given for the town commissioners to improve the harbour which, though busy, had a nasty bar at its entrance and not much depth within it. Progress was slow - the famine years tur...

  When I wrote about the lost lighthouse at the tip of East Twin Island last year   I was somewhat frustrated by the fact that, although it was pulled down as late as 1965, I could not, for the life of me, find a decent photograph of the light, which had stood, in one form or another, for over 120 years. I will spare the reader a repetition of the long, tortuous and incomplete history of this light, which can be found at the link above. This post is merely to reproduce the much more interesting photo of the light that I came across at one of the NMNI sites recently. As suspected, the light was a skeletal tower but a scaling of its entire height by ladder was not necessary as it seems it was accessed from the roof of a building adjoining the house. I am in two minds as to whether that is the fog signal at the base of the tower or if it was housed in that small room on the adjoining roof. I believe this is/was the only lighthouse of this type in Ireland, though I am open to corr...

  Rathlin O'Beirne lighthouse and keepers' cottages (photo by Karl Birrell) With the exception of the uncategorisable Kish light, you can probably divide Ireland's coastal lighthouses into three main categories - onshore lighthouses, island lighthouses and rock lighthouses, where the difference between the latter two would be that rock lighthouses had no other inhabitants. And, in general (again) it was on the rock lighthouses that most of the dramas occurred. The histories of the Tuskar, Fastnet, Slyne Head etc are littered with shipwrecks and drownings and shaking towers and tenders capsizing and make for stirring reading. Alone among the west coast rock lights, Rathlin O'Beirne, off the coast of south west Donegal (and not to be confused with Rathlin Island on the north coast) seems to have led a beatific, serene existence, compared to its wave-lashed neighbours. Of course, it is larger (only slightly moreso than the Skelligs) but it is not far from Eagle Island and ...