Pete's Irish Lighthouses

  The East Twin light 1946. The house was built in 1925, shortly after the events in this post. The original light was a large triangle. Many lighthouse enthusiasts will be familiar with the IRA raids on Irish lighthouses in the late 1910s / early 1920s. Remote and difficult to protect, light stations such as Mine Head, Roancarrig, Hook and even the Fastnet, were raided by Republicans. They were mainly interested in the gun cotton which was used to fire the fog cannons but they wouldn't turn up their noses to personal hand guns and rifles, binoculars, telescopes etc. Such was the regularity of these raids, that the lighthouses had to withdraw their fog signalling service until normality was resumed. One armed, sectarian raid on a lighthouse, though, did not fit into the above template. Redmond 'Edward' Doran was a Catholic and keeper of the two East Twin lighthouses in Belfast Harbour.  In one of the houses, he resided and the other it was his duty to maintain. Although boa...

  Rock Lighthouses of Britain and Ireland (Fastnet on the cover) Way back in the halcyon days of 1983, when lightkeepers still roamed the earth, a young man named Chris Nicholson brought out a remarkable book called "Rock Lighthouses of Britain." Instantly regaled as a classic and the seminal work on the subject, it was remarkable in both the detailed research on all the lighthouses featured and the stunning photographs, many of them never seen before. Such was its success that it has been reprinted - a very rare thing for a lighthouse book and one that lesser writers such as myself can only yearn for - more than once and two further editions were brought out in 1995 and 2006, both with updated information and even more stunning photographs. Despite this achievement, the book had one slight drawback to Irish lighthouse enthusiasts like myself. Only featuring maritime navigation off the coasts of one part of the archipelago, the main part of our shared island group - Ireland ...

The Aleria lighthouse (above) is not one of your classical lighthouses, tall and slender, tapering slightly as it rises, perched on a jutting headland. It sits at the eastern end of a rubble breakwater, marking the northern point of the River Boyne where it flows out into the sea, guiding vessels into the estuary and then upriver seven kilometers to the port of Drogheda. The light is situated on top of a solid, ten-meter-tall, unpainted stone tower and a white stone dome. It is accessed by an external ladder and flashes green to make sure ships entering the Boyne keep it to starboard. Its nearest relations in the lighthouse world would be the Muglins (off Dalkey, county Dublin) and Ballagh Rocks (in county Donegal.) The River Boyne marks the boundary between counties Louth (to the north) and Meath (to the south) As such Aleria is in county Louth but the best views of it are from Mornington, co. Meath on the south bank of the Boyne. The rubblestone jetty is quite long and fairly untrave...

  The Old Head of Kinsale c1906 from the CIL collection in the National Library This post, which admittedly is more about the wreck than the lighthouse, is culled from the Cork Examiner 13th February 1862. The tail end of the story was mentioned in the Edward Lezarde post. The sloop Adelaide left Cork for Clonalkilty in January 1862. As journeys went, they'd probably have been better off sending the cargo of fifty-two tons of Indian corn by donkey and cart. For a start, they were wind-bound near Crosshaven for two weeks and then somehow found themselves trying to ride out a storm when they were off the Old Head of Kinsale. Unfortunately, they lost both their jib and a young member of the crew in the storm and tried to put into the bay on the east side of the Head. I t was dusk and she was being drawn inexorably, by waves and a stiff south-easterly wind towards the perpendicular cliff face, two hundred feet high.  As night fell, the lightkeepers saw her no more. When morning ...

  Workers painting the Tuskar c1908 from the CIL collection in the National Library Ireland It is a simple fact of life that people remember people with unusual names. He may be less interesting person than Robert Smith or James Murphy but Edward Lezard (sometimes Lezards, LeZarde, Lizard etc) keeps cropping up in my research of nineteenth century keepers to the point where I feel I must get his career down in print before I slither off into the undergrowth. And it also gives me the excuse to put up a few pictures of the places he served. According to CIL's 1871 List of Keepers, Edward was aged 27 when he joined the service on 8th June 1846, making him born around 1818-1819. Most genealogical trees have him born in 1826 but this is doubtless based on his reported age at death, a notoriously unreliable assumption.  Edward's full name was Edward Joseph Marie and his father was Maturin Claude (or Claude Maturin) Lezard from Cellettes in the Loire district of France. An 1880 Censu...

  Behold the twin spires of Clifden, co. Galway, an iconic image of the town. On the left is the Protestant Christ Church, built 1853-64 on the site of an older church. To the right is the larger St. Joseph's RC Church built in stages from 1875 to 1891. The two churches share a commanding hilltop view of the town of Clifden and look out past the Sky Road over Clifden Bay to the Atalanticle Ocean. Thing is - one of them could well have been a lighthouse, according to a brief snippet in the Northern Whig in 1924: - Of course, I could never raise the slightest doubt on the veracity of a story that originated in the Daily Express but it is an interesting idea. I can't really think of any other reason for the plan than the obvious one of telling ships where they were so, if it ever happened, one of the churches could well have been a lighthouse, at least, until the first strong wind blew all those electric lights off.  But which one? Were the Catholics or the Protestants the owner...

The Bull Rock station taken from the west end of Dursey Island The following is a verbatim report that appeared in The Field Magazine ('The Country Gentleman's Newspaper') on 2nd July 1892: We cast off from the pier at Berehaven on May 11 at 5am, and with smooth water and just enough wind to create a draught on our furnace and a strong ebb tide in our favour, we were soon alongside the Bull Rock, a small islet lying about two and a half miles N.W. of Dursey Island and 292 feet high. This is the most southerly breeding haunt of the gannet on the Irish coast. There is deep water close to the rock and in fine weather a small steamer may lie close in to a remarkable arched hole worn by the action of the sea through the island. A good view of the buildings on the east side may be obtained and the effect of the view under the almost perpendicular cliff is somewhat heightened by the probability that some of the loose stones, which jut out here and there from the face of the roc...