Pete's Irish Lighthouses

This is an Irish lighthouse blog and in all the years I've been writing it, I have never featured a lighthouse from the USA or indeed from Liechtenstein, Uzbekhistan or the Central African Republic. So this is a first and probably an 'only.' My thanks go to Carissa, one of the students at Fuller's Library in New Hampshire. They wrote to me a while ago, requesting information on lighthouse sites I would recommend to help them with a maritime project they were doing. I sent them back a list I put together and wished them well. One of the lighthouse sites that I failed to include was this one  which features a wonderful graphic of 100 lighthouses of the USA, together with a footnote about the oldest, the tallest etc. Carissa thought I would like this chart and, through one of her tutors, Mrs Skye Olley, forwarded it on to me.  I have to admit it is a terrific graphic. I have seen only about five of the hundred and it has certainly whetted my appetite to visit some more. It...

  The roseate terns for which Rockabill was famous. Evidently they weren't there in the early 1900s I came across this piece recently in the Irish Naturalist Vol 18 No.3 (1909), which I heartily recommend for a spot of light reading unless, like me, you keep getting confused by Naturalists and Naturists. The piece is prefaced by a person called R.H. Scovell who was the type of scientist who probably liked to keep his (or her) clothes on. R.H. was interested in bird migration and came across our old friend Benjamin Robert Jeffers , a lightkeeper and Open Brethren, who, with his dog, saved a bunch of people from drowning off Straw Island six years later. Benjamin, who was the keeper at Rockabill at the time, offered to copy out extracts from his journal that mentioned birds on the 'Bill and these extracts were published in the Irish Naturalist, once B.R. had established it wasn't a nudie mag. I reproduce them in full. Nov 10, 1906 - Our larder was replenished last night to t...

  The fog-bell as taken by Sir Robert Ball on a Commissioner of Irish Lights inspection tour around 1908 when the bell was comparatively new. Photograph from CIL Album 7 in the National Library of Ireland The Fog Bell Gloomily through the white sea fog    Comes the boom of the Barr Point Bell, Telling at regular intervals    The warning it has to tell; It warns the mariner far at sea    Of the crags at its rocky base, And the helmsman hears and quickly steers    Clear of this dangerous place. For the white sea-mist, the grey sea-mist    That blots out Isle Magee Is creeping, slowly creeping    O'er the harbour and the sea. Short is the time since a sturdy ship    Was rent on those cruel teeth. And the gallant crew went down to their fates    With the white sea spume for a wreath. Loudly, loudly, the fog-bell tolled    Through the gale and the murky gloom. Not steam nor sail could fight that ga...

The much overlooked Leverets lighthouse on the approach to the docks in Galway (photograph Marinas.com) I suppose its only natural that lighthouses that never had a keeper should fall under the radar somewhat. Ardnakinna, Rosslare Copper Point and the Leverets don't really have that folk memory that allows them to gain kudos in the lighthouse world, which is a shame because Leverets, for one, is quite an interesting structure. For a start, the name is somewhat strange. People who do pub quizzes (do they still exist in the era of the mobile phone?) will know that a leveret is a young hare, with no obvious connection to lighthouse. But the Leverets are two rocks that the lighthouse is built on and the nearby slightly larger land masses are called Hare Island and Rabbit Island. With the development of Galway and particularly the city shoreline in the 1950s and 1960s, the light on Mutton Island, which previously had marked the entrance to the docks (as well as warning away from nearby ...

  From Beam 12.1 I kind of like that poem, conjuring up an image of a lightship captain leaning on the handrail and gazing out onto a perfectly calm ocean. Not to mention the ambiguous last line - is it the crew of the vessel he is talking about, or the drowned mariners of yesteryear? And it appeals to my sense of symmetry, with the lines beginning A, A, A and And. The Quirkes, like many lightshipmen, were from the Faythe and Parnell Street in Wexford (the Grandad in me is dying to say they were Quirkes of Faythe) but their naissance in the wonderful world of engineless boats seems to have started with a Gaul.  Philip Quirke was a carpenter / joiner in Wexford in the late 1800s and his children included Mary, John, Barnaby and Peter. It was Mary who started the ball rolling, marrying one Richard Gaul in 1898. He was a seaman aboard a 'floating light,' the Lucifer lightship, in 1911. John also worked on the lightships though on a more temporary nature, filling in for absent or ...