Pete's Irish Lighthouses

  Scattery Island lighthouse Back in September, I wrote a post about my visit to Scattery Island and t he renovation of the keepers' cottage thereon. I also promised to write about the lighthouse itself and then promptly forgot. Being over sixty, I now can blame all inaction on the febrile tendrils of my mind - one of the perks of getting old. Scattery Island (Inis Cathaigh) was the bailiwick of St. Senan, who, like St Kevin of Glendalough, was one of Ireland's great misogynistic saints. It lies off Kilrush at the mouth of the Shannon estuary and for many years was the headquarters of the river pilot industry on the Shannon.  Lightkeeper Don Scanlan, himself a Scattery man, wrote in his wonderful book "Memories of an Islander" how the pilots had originally operated from Pilot's Hill in Kilbaha, close to Loop Head, but after a tragedy in which five of them were drowned, they moved to Scattery. Near the summit of the only real hill in the centre of Scattery, they u...

  I came across a report recently dated 10th November 1848. It is a report on memorials received by the Admiralty relating to harbours and lighthouses in county Cork; memorials which were received from 1) the Grand Jury of county Cork and from the inhabitants of 2) Kinsale and Bandon; 3) Courtmacsherry and its environs; 4) Clonakilty and its neighbourhood; 5) Inishannon and its surroundings; and 6) the residents of Skibbereen and Schull. The report is the Admiralty's response to the memorials in the person of Captain John Washington. The map is indicative of the deplorable state of the lighting of the southern half of the country at the time. Reading from top left and working anti-clockwise around the coast, there are coastal lights at Loop Head, the Skelligs, Cape Clear, Kinsale, a small harbour light at Roches Point, Hook Head, the Coningbeg light-vessel, the Tuskar and the Arklow light-vessel.  Captain Washington comes down firmly on the side of the memorialists. In conclus...

  Seeing as it's nowhere near International Women's Day, I thought maybe I'd salute some of those pioneer women who first managed to wrestle a few shillings out of the Ballast Board for doing the same job that they'd probably been doing for most of their lives.  Up until the 1860s, lightkeeping was a very male job, at least officially. The men got paid for keeping the light, whilst the women kept the house, did the cooking, reared the children and, doubtless, kept the light as well, whenever hubby got man flu or there was a match on the telly. Of course, there was a lot of physicality to the work in the old days, so I shouldn't really diss the male keeper. My point is that women did their fair share of lightkeeping too. (The lighthouses here would not be the rock lighthouses but small stations that two people could manage.) Up until the 1860s, these stations frequently employed a Principal Keeper and an Assistant Keeper, single men who would share the one house prov...

Haulbowline light, Carlingfored Lough c.1906 I came across the following poem in an old Beam magazine and, of course, I had to follow it through to its logical conclusion.   Okay, just to get the housekeeping out of the way, a 'penion' is a large marine whelk. It is unlikely that the keeper is envying the birds their large marine whelks, so it is probably a typo for pinion -  a wing or feather. Jestic on the other hand has me stumped. It may be another word for 'majesty' - majestic, jestic - but then, for all I know, it could be a slang, lightkeeper term for ringworm powder and the barque is bring a supply of this over the bar. So, who was William Redmond and did he ever serve at Haulbowline? Well, William was the son of Hugh Redmond, who became a keeper as far back as 1818. Hugh served on the Skelligs and lost a son over the cliffs there. In 1839, he was serving on the South Maidens when his daughter, Mary Anne eloped with the son of a keeper on the North Maidens. Hugh...

  James and Billy Black at Eeragh The problem with lighthouses was that the Halpins and the Douglasses and the Stevensons always used to insist on building them next to the sea. Not in Athlone or the Galtees but right on the seafront, where salt-laden gales would scour off the paint in a matter of hours. Being daymarks as well as guiding lights at night, they naturally needed painting and there was a dedicated team at Irish Lights who would go around the country in pairs and do just that. I can find no articles about Irish lighthouse painters on the net (except, perhaps, the famous one about Brendan Behan at St. John's Point, county Down) and it is definitely an area that should be gone into. I bet the painters had some great stories to tell. I'd never really thought properly about the painters. Must have been some job swinging about at the top of a 100 foot tower in the biting wind. I'd say they developed some muscles in their forearms too. I paint a ceiling and have to li...