Pete's Irish Lighthouses

  Ballynagard light, on the west bank of the River Foyle It has been a while since I posted about a River Foyle or Foyle estuary lighthouse, which is a shame because this little-known stretch of coastline (in lighthouse terms) deserves much more exposure for the glittering array of lighthouses, pile lights and light-vessels that helped ships navigate their way between the port of Derry and the open sea. The river flows through Derry, where it widens out, before narrowing again and snaking up to Culmore. Just past Culmore, the river turns into an estuary and on the west bank you enter the Republic from the North at Muff, which gives me the opportunity to show this wonderful photo of the highly-fortified customs post at Muff in the early days of our nation. Derry of the Past Facebook page, shared by Michael Burns The Londonderry Harbour Commissioners started to light the Foyle in the late 1840s. The lighthouse at Ballynagard was not one of the first wave of navigational lights but th...

I suppose you can say that this is the way the world is these days. Social media is the be-all and end-all. Somebody writes a really interesting poem and posts it on Facebook and gets three 'likes.' Somebody else posts up a picture of last night's spaghetti bolognese and whoa! twenty thousand little love hearts. You've written a book or a song and the thing any potential publisher wants to know is 'how many likes'? So here is my bid for a record blogpost, featuring lots of cute and cuddly animals (ahhh, lookit!)  (Actually, I simply spotted a theme among my photographs and wondered how many 'lighthouses + animals' snaps I could come up with.) The photo above is Lee Maginnis' dog, Cane, at Donaghadee. Don't know if this is a horse or a pony but its at the old Cape Clear lighthouse A goat at the Muglins. Not sure why I'm telling you what the animal is.  Galley Head. Yup, it's a cow. Pretty sure this is old Inishtrahull. Also with a cow. But...

  This weekend, I was booked in to go to Cross Island, one of the Copeland Islands. It's the island that had the lighthouses before Mew Island light was established in 1884 and is now run by the RSPCB and I was doing a 48 hour stint there. Unfortunately, someone called Betty kicked up a storm, and the boat was cancelled. So, with a couple of days free, I used one of them to head down to the Shannon Estuary and took a tour of the lighthouse at Loop Head. And there I came across an interesting tale about which I'd never heard. Loop Head is a corruption of Leap Head. There are a lot of Leaps in Ireland from Priests Leap on the Cork / Kerry border to Leixlip in co. Kildare. And of course Leap itself, also in Cork. They all have legends associated with them, all of which are highly improbable. If you've ever been to Loop Head, you'll have obviously noticed the long, skinny rock lying parallel to the coast at the very end of the Head itself, home in spring to thousands of sea...

The Tuskar on its rock According to this week's Indo . a replica of  the Tuskar Rock lighthouse is to be erected in the middle of the Ashfield Cross Roundabout by the year’s end. The brainchild of the Rosslare Municipal District (RMD), efforts to signpost what is the first roundabout visitors to the country encounter when they depart from Rosslare Europort have been ongoing since 2019. Concerned at the boringness of the road leading out of Rosslare Europort, the RMD has sanctioned and planned the installation of the replica lighthouse roughly three miles from the port. As such, they are taking a leaf out of Arklow's book - further up the coast in the best county in Ireland - who, four years ago installed the lantern of the Automatic Lightfloat Skua on one of the motorway slip roads to the town. The Skua lantern off Junction 20 (Arkla) on the M11 Now, bearing in mind that Rosslare say the lighthouse will be a replica rather than a miniature, I am assuming that the installation ...

L' Île d'huile, I suppose they might call it in France. I don't really need an excuse to post a picture of Oyster Island. The white wall makes it look like its standing in a saucer. A couple of newspaper reports from the relatively early years of the lighthouses on Oyster Island. Yes, once upon a time there were two lights, which formed leading lights to guide ships up the channel between Oyster Island and Rosses Point on the approach to Sligo. Established in 1837, they were knocked when the channel moved in the 1890s, to be replaced by the lighthouse above.  Griffiths Valuation map showing the positions of the North and South lights on Oyster Island, as well as the unlit Metal Man I'm having little success in finding Mr. Kelly's first name. A Richard Kelly had been AK on Inis Mor (Aran Islands) in 1921. Could have been him, I suppose. A James Kelly was on Tory and Poolbeg in the 1830s. John Kelly was on the Skelligs for many years from 1838 to at least 1856 so it c...