Pete's Irish Lighthouses

  Irish Lights inspection time, Clare Island c.1905 (NLI) John Gillespie was born around 1859 in that hotbed of lighthouse keepers, the north Foyle estuary. His father, Neil, had been a river pilot there and the Gillespie name would become synonymous with that body of water, with many Gillespies working as pilots, fishermen, sea captains etc. Neil had married one Ellen Loughrey - another Shrove maritime name - prior to 1857. I haven't been able to find out very much about his career as a lightkeeper. Given his age, he would probably have joined the service in the early 1880s. Certainly he was an AK at Haulbowline in 1885 and shortly thereafter rocked up to Clare Island on the boat from Roonagh to take up the position of AK there. I am surmising that it was "shortly thereafter" because John married Mary Jane Hurley on 20th April 1887 in Westport. The daughter of a farmer from Inchireagh, Dunmanway, Mary Jane was employed as a school teacher on Clare Island. A baby girl, Ma...

  From James Morrissey's wonderful 'A History of the Fastnet Lighthouse' I came across this interesting snippet in the Irish Examiner of 19th October 1883, two years after its sister lighthouse on Calf Rock was swept from its perch off Dursey Island. The 1880s seems to have been a time for gales, with damage being done to the Fastnet and maroonings, at least one of which caused severe hardship for the keepers. Isaac Notter was the head honcho down in Crookhaven, owning much of the land and, for many years, held the contract for relieving the Fastnet. He also owned several pilot cutters and had his fingewr in many pies. In 1885, he commandeered 60 police officers in an abortive attempt to seize cattle from his tenants in default of rent. As a result of this, most of his employees downed tools in protest, including the crew of the lighthouse tender. Picture courtesy Joanna Doyle The two keepers who were accidentally relieved were PK James Walsh and AK Hamilton Kennedy.  Jame...

From the Robinson family album, early 1900s (NLI)   The Mystery of the Missing Perch a play in one act by The Drogheda Independent first performed on 5th December 1896 at Drogheda Harbour Office Scene: the Harbour Office at Drogheda, 1st December 1896 Cast of Characters, in order of appearance: The Engineer - dressed in filthy blue overalls, face coated in oil, wields a spanner The Secretary - lips blue from chewing a biro, frequently goes and makes cups of tea for those in attendance Reynolds - a foreshore worker, wears a cloth cap and hobnailed boots Messrs McEvoy and Nulty - board members, wear bowler hats and frock coats Mr Weldon, the Chair - four legs, made of pinewood Curtain opens The Harbour Board is in session The Engineer is explaining that the South Bar perch, 300m out to sea from the Aleria beacon, has disappeared and he can't find any other explanation, except that it had been knocked down by a passing vessel. He suspects a certain screw boat has hit it (it seems to s...

I am delighted that this blogpost is not from myself, not simply because I'm very lazy, but because it is by someone who is sickeningly young. Ciaran Newcombe is  a student in Transition Year in Christian Brothers College in Cork City. He is 16 and he undertook this research into Ballycotton lighthouse for the Cork Heritage Project led by Kieran McCarthy, former Lord Mayor of Cork. Ciaran is at pains to point out that the drone footage is not his, but the research, narration and editing is all his own work. As well as the video, he also produced a 28 page pdf on Ballycotton lighthouse, which is full of interesting facts on its history, fogbell, wrecks etc. I'm not sure why I'm mentioning this because I haven't managed to figure out a way of displaying a pdf on this page.

Knocknarea from Strandhill I n the west of Ireland in the modern-day county of Sligo, there stands a mountain overlooking Sligo Bay called Knocknarea. It is an energetic walk to the top from Strandhill near the coast and the top of the mountain is covered in a huge mound of stones, said to hide the tomb of Queen Maeve, famous for her cattle-raiding exploits. The Shanachies had a story about Knocknarea which must pre-date Queen Maeve, who was said to have lived in the 300s AD, about a century before St Patrick. At the time, the native Irish had been joined by two separate bands of settlers, one small and dark from the southern latitudes; and the other tall and blonde who had arrived from the north. I can't vouch for this because I wasn't around at the time. Both of the immigrant tribes built settlements on the coast and all three lived relatively peacefully together. The native Irish at the time still worshipped the sun. The settlers worshipped their own gods, or maybe none but ...

  The good residents of Bearna (or Barna), some five miles west of Galway city, will doubtless recognise the picture above, even though its quite some time since this P. Philips sketch was commissioned. Couples still promenade along the elegant east pier to the smaller lighthouse, gazing across at the barques and brigs and quinquiremes of Nineveh lined up along the west pier outside the magnificent Midland and Great Western Train Station. They admire the ornate gas lamps along the mile-long pier, wish passers-by 'Good morning' and maybe listen to the chatter emanating from the far quay with its passengers bound for Amerikay.  But mostly they will gaze in awe at the incredible, stately lighthouse that adorns the west pier, wondering, possibly, how the pier wall could possibly withstand such weight. Towering above the harbour like the Pharos of Alexandria, it has become one of the wonders of the modern world, worth a minimum five stars on Trip Advisor, a tourist destination in i...

Mr and Mrs White. Please note the blue sky, which is quite the rarity for this blog. Photo taken from up on the Sky Road on the other side of the channel  I've written about these two Connemara lovers before, gazing longingly at each other but I never got a picture of the two of them together. The near beacon is the White Lady. She sits at the end of the promontory that marks the southern entrance to Clifden Bay, near a lovely, quiet little harbour of Errislannan and a beach full of the most perfectly rounded stones I've ever seen. Incidentally, the name Errislannan ( Iorras Fhlannáin ) is derived from the same saint, Flannan, who gave his name to the island and lighthouse in Scotland from where three lightkeepers mysteriously disappeared at the start of the twentieth century. The White Lady's exact location is known as Fishing Point, probably because the fishing is supposed to be good there. Incidentally, one monologue from the beginning of the twentieth century calls her...

  Aside from humans, the two animals that were deliberately imported to Tearaght were rabbits and goats. All three were probably introduced at the same time. The rabbits were the rare Silver Grey variety and were a great boon, particularly at Christmas in an age where rabbit far superceded fowl as a Christmas and Sundays dish. They appear to have survived for 150 years though latterly there have been concerns for their existence. Puffins find it easy to evict rabbits from a basic burrow, so they only really survive in well-constructed burrows, and even then the gulls and ravens kill many of the young. A pair of milking goats were introduced onto the island in 1870, the year of the lighthouse's establishment. In Beam 12/1 (roughly 1981), Dr. Gerald A Watson of UCC talked about the goats. He said that from this originally pair, roughly 35 goats had been spawned by 1895. (I'm not great on zoology or, indeed, the reproductive system, but would 'milking goats' not need to b...

  There has been a harbour at Dún Laoghaire, then called Dunleary, since medieval times, though this would have been used only by small fishing boats. In later years, from at least as early as the 17th century, some passenger boats called in at the harbour to avoid the difficulties of accessing Dublin port. By the 18th century, some forty coal boats were trading with ports in England and to facilitate this a new pier was built in the 1760s, supervised by the military engineer, Charles Vallancey. The pier that commenced in 1817 had no connection with the old harbour at Dunleary, however, but was designed solely as a means of providing shelter for the safety of shipping during major storms. The port of Dublin was difficult to access due to a sand bar that ran across the mouth of the Liffey and, as there was nowhere else in Dublin Bay capable of sheltering ships, there were hundreds of wrecks in the bay over the centuries. As stated, the 1760s pier was often frequented by coal boats c...

The Foreland buoy which once sat at the entrance of Belfast Lough. There is/was a Foreland Buoy sitting outside the Mizen Centre in county Cork for many years. I have no idea if this buoy is the same one, and it has been transferred to Greencastle, or another one The price to pay for getting to see the lighthouses on Inishtrahull was a long journey up and a long journey back. Landing back at Bunagee Pier in beautiful sunshine, I was half minded to drive straight back and get it over with but decided that I had long wanted to see the Inishowen Maritime Museum in nearby Greencastle and God only knew how long it would be before I was up this way again. I have to say, I made the right decision. The Museum is situated on the front at Greencastle, looking out over the harbour. Don't take the road to the harbour if the ferry to county Derry is in or you'll end up blocked in. Take the little road to the front a couple of hundred yards south and turn left! For many years, I used to drea...

  Poer Head Fog Signal station 2014 It is now ten years since I visited Poer Head, famously one of only two Irish Lights stations that didn't have a light. (Mizen Head was the other but that was lit in 1959. You could theoretically also count Inishtrahull, which had a light at one end of the island and a fog signal at the other, until the new light was erected) The fog signal here was established in 1879 to help keep safe the notoriously foggy shores of East Cork but its lack of a light, together with its location in a very sparsely populated part of the country meant it very much went under the radar. In fact, not only did very few of the neighbours know about it, but sometimes even its keepers had never heard about it. I wrote about Poer Head previously here The end for Poer Head came in 1970. This is an account of the closure as recorded by the Irish Examiner 15th October of that year. And to round things off, because the story of lighthouses is very much the story of the keepe...