Pete's Irish Lighthouses

The Scarlet Tower in all her majesty. Photograph courtesy Mick Worland of Bunratty Search and Rescue I should be used to it by now but there are very few photographs of this wonderful example of our maritime history on the net. This tower has stood in the Shannon estuary for over 200 years, guiding thousands of ships past a dangerous rock. It is not by any means ugly. A cut stone tower, roughly five miles downriver from the city, tapering slightly towards the top and it was only by chance that I managed to pick up a picture of it. If it were to crumble tomorrow, there would be little to mark its passing pictorially. In the early part of the nineteenth century, the Corporation of the Chamber of Commerce of Limerick - consisting mainly of shipowners and merchants - were sick to the hind teeth of their ships striking the reef running from Scarlet Rock to the Whelps, which stretched over three-quarters of the width of the Shannon. Indeed, one of those wrecks was still visible th...

The Upper Light at Skellig Micheal with ruins of the keepers houses Occasionally I get emails from people asking if I know anything about lightkeepers of yore who feature in their family tree. Invariably I don't because I am primarily interested in the lighthouses and have not really made a study of the keepers, but I have an interest in family history and try to help as best I can, or at least set people on the right path. Last year, I received a letter from a lovely lady called Heather Walker from British Columbia in Canada, asking if I knew anything about her ancestor James Robert Redmond (both first names used!) and his father, Joshua Redmond, both of whom were lightkeepers in the service of Irish Lights (or whatever the association was known as, at the time) Well, I knew the Redmonds were one of the famous dynasties of Irish lightkeepers but trying to unravel the various strands was both exciting and fascinating. Suffice to say that Joshua Redmond, the father, was b...

Photo of one of Sir Robert Reading's cottage-style lighthouses at the Old Head of Kinsale built 1665. The light was exhibited by a coal fire in a brazier in the cutaway piece of the roof. Presumably the short-lived Islandmagee light would have been similar, if not identical. Seven years ago, I visited Muldersleigh Hill which overlooks the western entrance to Belfast Lough. In 1665, Sir Robert Reading was granted a patent to build and maintain six "lighthouses and towers" around the country and to extract tolls from passing ships to pay for their upkeep. One of them was at Isle of Magee, which corresponds to today's non-island, Islandmagee. Unfortunately, nobody seems to know exactly where this short-lived lighthouse was situated. Indeed, several authorities have categorically stated that the light was in fact the cottage lighthouse erected on Lighthouse Island, one of the Copeland Islands, on the opposite side of Belfast Lough. Google map of Belfast...

  Gunaway or Gunnaway or Gannaway Rock. The man is Denis Gallagher, who had this photograph on his bucket list for many years! The photographer was Velma Toombs and the rower of the boat was Peter 'Popsie' O'Hare. Photograph taken in the late 1940s. Information from the oldwarrenpoint forum There is a place near me in Dublin that I maintain is a magical place. It is on the M50 / N3 interchange. Cars circumnavigate this spot. The Royal Canal bisects it. The railway line to Sligo slices through it. And planes fly overhead. I like things like that. The one spot in America that is on my bucket list is where the four states - Arizona, Mexico, Utah and Colorado converge. You can apparently lie down on a designated spot and have all four limbs in different states. Gunnaway Rock, off Warrenpoint, (I will stick to this spelling because I like it, though the other two variations are commonplace) is, allegedly, one of these magical places that is probably a portal into a pa...

The light on Sod Island (pic courtesy of Mick Worland ) There is a famous story about how Nome in Alaska got its name. Apparently, an early draft of a map marked the settlement but the drafter didn't know what it was called and put 'Name' by the side of it. The printer misread this as Nome and thus the town was named (or Nomed, I suppose) I rather suspect that something similar happened to Sod Island. The Irish name for this small rocky patch of the Shannon is Oilean Dubhach, which translates as Sad Island. You see where I'm going here.... Sod Island lies in the middle of the river where, coming towards Limerick, the river starts to narrow into 'The Narrows', the long, winding stretch of the river that caused ships up to the middle of the nineteenth century to fear the approach to the city. There were many obstacles along this stretch. Horse Rock was the first danger reached; following it came a length of shoals totalling three miles, at the end of...