Pete's Irish Lighthouses

  A totally unrelated but beautiful Pat Cook photo of Aranmore at sunset That’s what they used to call us, says Ciarán O’Bríaín, lightkeeper 570 in the pantheon of Irish Lights’ personnel.   Seagulls’ eggs. Children of lightkeepers who were born on the ledge on which their parents happened to alight. A cursory check of Irish censuses will show a wonderful geographical spread of ‘place of birth’ for the keeper, his wife and seven children which incidentally is a very handy way to work out the stations the father served at to that point. In Ireland, in particular, a sense of place and belonging is deeply rooted in the psyche. You will grow up and be known all your life as a Wexfordman or a Donegal man or a Limerick man, or whatever county you happened to pop out into the sunlight in. And that will very much mark you down, in the eyes of others, as the type of person you are. It is all down to local history and folk memory and the trials and tribulations endured by that particul...

  This is the Ross Coastguard station about a mile north of Killala in county Mayo. I wrote about it here in July 2022 because, well, it did officially shine a light from the top window to mark the limit of a reef to the north and the entrance to Killala harbour to the south. Hence it was, to all intents and purposes, a lighthouse, though not a purpose-built one. My wife and I spent a week up here at the end of March/start of April. It was cold and windy but a beautiful and historic part of the country. The history is everywhere in the countryside from the 3500bc Ceide Fields to countless burial tombs and standing stones and from the relatively intact monasteries and abbeys at Moyne and Rosserk and Rathfran to the site of the French landing at Kilcummin in 1798. Just to place exactly where I'm talking about, here's a Google map: - The blue bit is Killala Bay, an offshoot of Sligo Bay. The river, bottom centre, is the Moy, a famous salmon river that leads down to Ballina and be...

Model of the Cormorant lightship, Codling Bank.  The following article appeared in the Irish Press of 21st June 1955. Words by Dominick Coyle. Pictures by Bill St Ledger. Although parts of it are quite interesting, I feel the journalist could have done so much more with the opportunity he got! Just imagine it – you can walk through the waters of the Irish Sea nine miles from Dun Laoghaire amid 90 feet of water. That is, you can....theoretically. The sausage-like chain of sandbanks running from the Kish Bank with breaks down to Wexford shows its face occasionally at low water. The benefit to Ireland of these banks is negligible; their nuisance value is considerable. Yet their nuisance value can certainly outweigh their usefulness, even in time of war. Their presence is a menace to navigation; and in themselves they are an expensive liability to the Commissioners of Irish Lights. This liability is efficiently met in many ways, not least among them being the lightships at Kish, Codl...

  July 2024 pic of the new light on Inishtrahull The new lighthouse on Inishtrahull was the first major lighthouse constructed in Ireland since Rathlin West. Smaller lights such as Blackhead in Clare had been added to the list but Inishtrahull was the first large light to be built since 1916. There would only be one more – the Kish. I have no idea where I obtained the following little presentation from but it may well have belonged to somebody who took part in the 'Hull's inauguration ceremony on the 8th October 1958, nearly seventy years ago. It took the form of a little booklet with the programme of events, three photos, evidently recently taken, and a prepared potted history of the light. To be fair, I'd have loven to be a part of that trip, provided they had some Jaffa cakes as part of the afternoon tea. Unfortunately, to quote a line from a Ponytails song of the time, why was it my fate/ to be born too late? A couple of points about the itinerary. Around 1880, it was t...