Pete's Irish Lighthouses

  Roches Point 1862 Roches Point sits at the entrance of one of the largest natural harbours in the world - Cork - and, naturally enough was regarded as one of the major Irish lighthouses of the nineteenth century. It was so necessary that, in 1832, the Ballast Board decided that the light built there in 1817 was too small for the job, so they took it down, brick by brick, and shipped it off to Duncannon in county Wexford, and replaced it with a larger lighthouse. It was, however, not so important as to waste the expense of a second keeper at the light. From 1817 to 1861, Roches Point was a one-keeper station, the sole keeper being expected to stay alert and vigilant during the 14 hours of winter darkness, to attend to all the repairs and painting and cleaning.  Atkinson painting c. 1848 For nearly twenty of those years, the keeper at Roches Point was a guy called Bradley Sole, who had been born in Deal in Kent in 1812. Eight miles further down the coast he would have been a D...

I came across this unattributed poem in Beam 11.2 (1979-80) I'm assuming it was written by somebody in the Lighthouse Depot, at the end of his tether trying to figure out what 'the yoke at the end of the yoke' meant.   A Tale of Repairs The P.K. gazed with heavy frown Upon his diesel, broken down, And hastened to his Radio Phone               to get repairs. He told the Mizen of his woe, About the fog (he had to blow) But not a number did he know               nor seem to care. "The part I want," he wisely said "is hollowed out and painted red. I had the number in my head                but I forget. It holds the thingimibob in place About an inch from the long brace That fastens to the big main base,               and keeps it set." "They'll surely know the part I mean, It broke before on this machine. The what-you-may...