Lighting the first lamp on Dursey Island

After slaloming along the never-ending, westerly road from Castletownbere, you finally arrive at the cable-car, the only one in Ireland. If it is operational and not otherwise in use, take it to the island across the sound, Dursey Island, pop. 4, at the last count. Then walk, or run, or hop, or do the mashed potato, the four miles to the far end of the island and, as you traverse the last summit, two buildings will come into view.
One of them is the Calf Rock lighthouse, only 15 years old when a severe storm brought the bulk of its tower down in 1881, leaving just a rusting stump to remind everyone that the sea will spot the slightest weakness in man and man's world and punish it accordingly.

The other edifice to be seen on this wild and remote spot is the four dry stone walls of an old house, slightly hidden under the brow of the hill, hunched, roofless, moodily staring out to the tiny islet off the coast. You would be forgiven for wondering who on earth would be mad enough to build a house out here on this wind-ravaged spot facing the savagest ocean in these islands.

And the answer would be Irish Lights.

Aside from the clamour to get the six inhabitants of Calf Rock back to the mainland, there was, of course, a realisation that the loss of the lighthouse meant there was now no light to mark the entrance to Bantry Bay and no light between the Fastnet and Skellig Michael. Even as the men waited day after day for the sea to abate enough to permit a rescue, plans were being drawn up for a temporary light to be erected on the far extremity of Dursey Island.

I talked a bit about the temporary light many years ago here so I won't repeat myself, except to say that the stone structure never had a roof - they were simply walls to offer some protection to the three-roomed wooden house that constituted the station. A lightship mast and lantern (which could presumably be raised and lowered?) provided the temporary light - the same arrangement that applied when the optics at Inishtrahull (1864) and Wicklow Head (1865) were altered.

The works had begun on Monday 19th December under the stewardship of H.T. Bergin and the lamp apparatus was prepared in the Irish Lights' depot in Kingstown (Dun Laoghaire) prior to being transported down to Dursey with Captain Thomas McCombie. The fact that the light was established on 1st February 1882, a bare nine weeks after the disaster, is testament to the work and planning of a company previously renowned for prevarication and procrastination.

Our old friend, John Swan Sloane, writing in the Irish Builder of February 15th 1882, then describes the lighting of the lamp:

All being ready at sunset (4h.57m.10s) on the 1st instant, the torch was given to the lightkeeper's wife - as is customary on such occasions - and she ignited the lamps, those present standing uncovered; the Commissioners' flag being hoist to the mast-head. The Rev. John Halahan having delivered an impressive address of a few but well-chosen words, returned to the mainland with Captain Boxer; Mr Douglass had been obliged to leave the day previously.

This tradition of the lightkeeper's wife lighting the first lamp was a new one on me. Granted not many new lights were established in the 1900s and so the custom may have died out. Most of the new lights established - Ardnakinna, Achillbeg, Sheeps Head, Long Island etc - were automated anyway, so there was no keeper and therefore no wife.

Sloane doesn't name the lightkeeper's wife but it was almost definitely Jane Keenan, wife of PK James Keenan. The couple had been married in October 1853 in Ardmore when James, in his first position as an AK at Mine Head, had fallen for PK Peter Tyrrell's daughter. As with the Calf Rock, the families of the keepers continued to live in the dwellings on the mainland at Dursey Sound. 

Assisting James in maintaining the light were AKs John Harrington (who had been on Calf Rock when the proverbial hit the fan) and Hugh Dugan (who had been the keeper ashore)