Pete's Irish Lighthouses

As the Association of Light Keepers will be in town from Saturday to Tuesday and a trip to Rathlin Island has been scheduled in, this is an opportune time to highlight a tale from The Irish Press , 21st November 1944.  CIL Inspection trip c 1905 The accommodation for the families of the West Light keepers were also located at the East Light. The two lights at Rathlin East (or simply "Rathlin" before the Rathlin West light was established in 1919) were established in 1856. The lower, fixed, baby light was discontinued in 1894. The cave system in the cliffs below the lighthouse is supposed to be the place where Robert the Bruce had his arachnid experience. Rathlin East was one of the last lighthouses on the Irish coast to go automatic, holding out until 1995.  It was also the scene of a terrible accident in 1912. Dennis 'Denny' Duff was an AK at the lighthouse, four years into his career with Irish Lights. The Princess Maud steamer, laden with tourists, was passing the...

  Another beautiful wee video from the elusive Nick from Holywood (check out his Irelandscapes videos on YouTube) who documents ordinary life both rural and maritime mainly in counties Antrim and Down. This one is taken from Whitehead on the south Antrim coast and features the islands and marine traffic of the outer Belfast Lough. As such we see the old Lighthouse Island (38 secs) and Mew Island (44 secs) in quick succession.

  Something a little bit different for this post, please forgive the indulgence.  I recently had the good fortune to visit Ballycotton (or Ballycottin, as it was often written) on a beautiful warm summer's day in East Cork. I will write about the visit and the history in a subsequent post or posts but I recently came across a short, short story called " A Keeper's Woman, " written eight years ago by a multi-talented lady named Henrietta McKervey. I requested permission to reproduce it in full on the blog and Henrietta kindly agreed. A Keeper’s Woman We’d say to one another, and we’d nod saying it, wasn’t herself the luckiest woman in Ballycotton? And though they had gone and painted the lighthouse black, and in our hearts we wondered was that the worst of luck, we would say what great fortune Enagh had, that she’d always know where her husband was, and what he was up to.  He’d not be touching a drop out there neither , one of us would be bound to say, and Josie would ...

  Black Head lighthouse, county Antrim I was searching recently for a man called John F. Connell who had posted two fascinating photos of Eagle Island in an old Beam magazine (I was trying to trace him to see if he had any more!) I enlisted the services of Gary Google, who came up with a listing for Black Head lighthouse in a Northern Island Government Historical Buildings document. Among all the technical information was an appendage entitled  " Notes c1999 from John Connell, Lighthouse keeper. In his 63rd year in Irish Lights (retired at 60, now aged about 82)" I will quote the passage in full, with but two comments. Firstly, I have no idea what the timeline for the passage is but Mr. Connell was 20 in 1935, so it had to have been after that. And secondly, lightkeepers needed to be reasonably literate, so I am assuming the dreadful spelling - which is mostly decipherable - must be down to the transcripting by the Historic Building people. 'Opn lighthouses ye'd alwa...

Photo Andrew Doherty Harbour lights, in general, get much less coverage than the CIL lighthouses, probably because they employ awful PR consultants, who simply take the money but don't produce the gigs. Yet they each deserve to be recorded in the annals of maritime navigational history before the inevitable happens and they are replaced by rectangles on sticks. The Guide Bank light is situated on the approach to Waterford port on the very eastern point of Little Island. Here, the river Suir rejoins itself after splitting in two to circumvent the island. The northern channel - known as the Queen's Channel - is the normal route as it is straighter and simpler, though smaller craft can negotiate the longer King's Channel. Prior to 1818, the Queen's Channel was often shallow enough for Kilkenny people to cross from the northern shore, a state of affairs that the Waterford people could not tolerate for long. E-Oceanic chart The Guide Bank light is located at the end of a 700...

  Slyne Head - like Bull Rock or the two west coast Black Rocks -  is one of those lighthouses that many of us Irish lighthouse fans only get to see from a distance, often hazy in the mist and not on the route of any commercial ferry. Given the lighthouse-connected drownings that occurred off the island in 1836, 1838, 1852 and 1859, it would probably cost a fortune in public liability insurance to set up such a concern. Consequently, we lighthouse spotters have to make do with views from the Golf Course in Ballyconneely or Omey Island. Or get to see glimpses of the real island through wonderful, of short, documentaries like this one by Eleanor Mannion.

  The magnificent lighthouse at Mine Head in the county of Waterford should really be more well known than it is. A major sea-light on the south coast of Ireland, it has the highest elevation of any of Ireland's current lighthouses - 87 meters - and in 1851, along with Ballycotton, helped to fill in a large swathe of black coast between Roches Point and Hook Head. Yet it is said that even locals are sometimes unaware of its existence, located on a largely human-free headland at the end of a tortuous route of tiny country lanes. Indeed, when last I was there in 2008, when Google Maps had never even registered in my Luddite head, I completely failed to find it, having to make do with a middle-distance view over many fields. This time around, I was more successful. Last time I had heeded all the 'Private Property - trespassers will be disembowelled' signs but Google Maps is the God who knows everything and He led me carefully down a pot-holed road that threatened the tyres on...

In 1870, Edward McCarron had been transferred from Dundalk lighthouse to his second station on Arranmore, as Assistant Lightkeeper to Richard Stapleton. In his book "Life in Donegal," he recounts a rescue in 1871, about which a lingering taste of bitterness still lingered. Edward did get a reward  though, as per the Nautical Magazine of 1871: Edward McCarron and family at a later posting. Picture courtesy Gay McCarron