Pete's Irish Lighthouses

  My posting has been fairly non-existent for December so as an apology, I wish you all a very merry Christmas and send you this very old Christmas card which seems to encapsulate what the festive season is all about. Imagine the eight-year-old child coming down on Christmas morning to find the cat has eaten her pet budgie .... I had hoped, as this is a lighthouse blog, to bring you a lighthouse Christmas card but they are few and far between and rarely very humorous. But there is a lighthouse link in the above card. Audrey Arthure is a fellow Irish lighthouse enthusiast and well she should be, as her pedigree of Hills and Whelans goes back to the first half of the nineteenth century, many of each family serving as either lightkeepers or coastguards. John Whelan, for example, joined the Ballast Board, (as was) in 1856/7, as the son of a lightkeeper. Frank Hill, born 1878 was both the son and grandson of a coastguard. Frank Hill and Annie Sweeney on their wedding day in 1908. Annie...

Painting of the Holywood Bank lighthouse, artist unknown, currently in the Belfast Harbour Board office. Dated to 1860. As per the previous post, this is one of over 70 stories of Irish lighthouse fatalities, in my forthcoming book, When the light goes out. Joseph Kerr and the Holywood Bank light 1855 One of the great names in Irish (and indeed global) lighthouse history is Alexander Mitchell, the blind, Belfast engineer (born in South William Street in Dublin but the family moved to Belfast when young). Inspired by how easily a corkscrew went into a cork but could not be pulled out straight, he transferred the principal to the problem of building edifices on mud. The story goes that, in the 1830s, with his 19-year-old son, John, he rowed out into Belfast Lough with a long pole attached to a metal screw. This he screwed into the mud, leaving the top of the pole exposed. He came back the following day to find the pole still  in situ  and the screwpile lighthouse was born. ...

As some of ye may know, I've been writing a book about fatalities at Irish lighthouses, a cheery little tome, which is a collection of deaths suffered by keepers, their families, tradesmen and contracted ferry operators from 1786 to 1972. Not every death, mind. Some are lost in the mists of time and some are not really noteworthy but there are roughly 70 tales of people who paid the ultimate price for keeping our seas safe for mariners. It didn't help that the Irish Lights archive has been unavailable for the last couple of years (great time to write a lighthouse book!) but I was able to work around it. It is roughly 80,000 words long and, despite the grim subject matter, or maybe because of it, I've tried to keep it light-hearted where appropriate, while trying at all times to be respectful to the memory of the deceased. I have sent a few individual chapters out to descendants of those involved and have got the green light from all of them, which makes me hopeful that I...

It's kind of like having a superstar living on your street. No matter how great and wonderful you may be, you're always going to be overshadowed by the national celebrities. Thus is the lot of Wicklow Pierhead lighthouse, forced for all eternity to listen to the endless tributes to the three bigshot lighthouses on nearby Wicklow Head, each of them older and taller and brighter than the mere 130 year old harbour light sitting modestly at the end of Wicklow's East Pier. Like many east coast settlements, fishing has been going on at Wicklow for centuries. The Vikings arrived and set up a base upriver from the coast and maritime trade slowly grew the village into a small town, despite the presence of the sandbanks that run parallel to much of the country's east coast. In the 1840s, royal assent was given for the town commissioners to improve the harbour which, though busy, had a nasty bar at its entrance and not much depth within it. Progress was slow - the famine years tur...

  When I wrote about the lost lighthouse at the tip of East Twin Island last year   I was somewhat frustrated by the fact that, although it was pulled down as late as 1965, I could not, for the life of me, find a decent photograph of the light, which had stood, in one form or another, for over 120 years. I will spare the reader a repetition of the long, tortuous and incomplete history of this light, which can be found at the link above. This post is merely to reproduce the much more interesting photo of the light that I came across at one of the NMNI sites recently. As suspected, the light was a skeletal tower but a scaling of its entire height by ladder was not necessary as it seems it was accessed from the roof of a building adjoining the house. I am in two minds as to whether that is the fog signal at the base of the tower or if it was housed in that small room on the adjoining roof. I believe this is/was the only lighthouse of this type in Ireland, though I am open to corr...

  Rathlin O'Beirne lighthouse and keepers' cottages (photo by Karl Birrell) With the exception of the uncategorisable Kish light, you can probably divide Ireland's coastal lighthouses into three main categories - onshore lighthouses, island lighthouses and rock lighthouses, where the difference between the latter two would be that rock lighthouses had no other inhabitants. And, in general (again) it was on the rock lighthouses that most of the dramas occurred. The histories of the Tuskar, Fastnet, Slyne Head etc are littered with shipwrecks and drownings and shaking towers and tenders capsizing and make for stirring reading. Alone among the west coast rock lights, Rathlin O'Beirne, off the coast of south west Donegal (and not to be confused with Rathlin Island on the north coast) seems to have led a beatific, serene existence, compared to its wave-lashed neighbours. Of course, it is larger (only slightly moreso than the Skelligs) but it is not far from Eagle Island and ...

Birds and lighthouses have always had a strange sort of relationship. Keepers, both of lighthouses and lightships, were often recruited as amateur ornithologists and encouraged to send specimens to scientific organisations. Some of them actually became quite professional and were able to identify birds rarely if ever seen on our coasts. At night, birds are attracted to the beams, often flying straight at the glass and extinguishing themselves rather than the light. Keepers have often reported hundreds of birds lying dead and stunned at the base of a lighthouse on waking up in the morning. Some would fly straight at the lantern and break their beaks. Others would throttle themselves on the lattice work surrounding the lantern, some would fall prey to lighthouse cats. Ducks were no exception, migrating birds often finding the warm glow of the lighthouse beam a tempting encouragement to break their journey and rest. According to nineteenth century reports, many were killed by breaking the...

Loop Head today ( By Charles W Glynn, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1909644) 'In far Loop Head did somebody a stately small lighthouse erect ...' So begins the first draft of  Samuel T aylor Coleridge's epic poem "Kubla Khan," which sadly veered off the subject of pharology in later versions. It was a shame that Sammy didn't mention when the lighthouse was built and by whom, as it would have avoided a lot of confusion among today's lighthouse historians. At the tip of the Loop or Leam peninsula, there is a wonderfully photogenic rock lying parallel to the cliff face. Legend has it that Cu Culainn, pursued by an old woman, leapt from the mainland onto the rock. The woman followed. Summoning all his strength, The Hound leapt back and the old woman, trying to do the same, fell to her death. (I'm sure I saw this in a film on the New York subway) Hence the name Cuchullins Leap. OSI First edition map Who built the first lighth...

The South Rock lighthouse three miles off the coast of county Down is, as we all know, the oldest wave-washed lighthouse in the world, still standing and is therefore criminally overlooked by our maritime historians, possibly because it is difficult to get up close to. The only surviving Thomas Rogers lighthouse, I'd better do a decent post about it soon, but for now, this post is about the keepers. Built in 1797, the first keepers and their families lived in the tower itself. It was a single family operation, no relief keepers, and a boat came once a week from Newcastle pier, the nearest place on the shore. The pier had been constructed specifically to aid the construction of the lighthouse and lay in the townland of Newcastle, on the southern shore of Millin Bay. (This should not be confused with the town of Newcastle further down the county Down coast, though I confuse the two frequently) It is said that the first keeper was a man named McCullough and there is a possibly apocryp...