The lighthouses at Bearna

 

The good residents of Bearna (or Barna), some five miles west of Galway city, will doubtless recognise the picture above, even though its quite some time since this P. Philips sketch was commissioned. Couples still promenade along the elegant east pier to the smaller lighthouse, gazing across at the barques and brigs and quinquiremes of Nineveh lined up along the west pier outside the magnificent Midland and Great Western Train Station. They admire the ornate gas lamps along the mile-long pier, wish passers-by 'Good morning' and maybe listen to the chatter emanating from the far quay with its passengers bound for Amerikay. 

But mostly they will gaze in awe at the incredible, stately lighthouse that adorns the west pier, wondering, possibly, how the pier wall could possibly withstand such weight. Towering above the harbour like the Pharos of Alexandria, it has become one of the wonders of the modern world, worth a minimum five stars on Trip Advisor, a tourist destination in its own right. Up above on the balcony, a cheery keeper doffs his cap to indicate a hearty 'top o' the morning' to one and all.

The plans above (which bear a close resemblance to those of Dun Laoghaire harbour) date from the early years of last century, when Bearna was yet again proposed as the major port for journeys westwards across the Atalanticle Ocean. Blacksod and Wesport in Mayo, Limerick and Valentia in Kerry had also been mooted and great plans and notions occupied many minds for well over a century.

Unfortunately (or maybe not) for Bearna, it never happened. Despite millions being invested in the project, the difficulty of leasing the necessary land and the withdrawal from the scheme by the railway meant that the plans were dead in the quite deep water by 1916. So no trips to Bearna for lighthouse enthusiasts like myself.

Lighthouseless Barna pier today

However, not many people are aware that Bearna did once have a lighthouse. Saunders Newsletter from 8th November 1784 reported that the local bigwig, Mr Lynch, had just finished building an elegant pier on his lands at Bearna and had gone to wash his hands. It was large enough for 'one hundred fmall fail of fifhing boats', which is not easy to say while eating  a boiled egg. 

Fast forward in the Tardis to 1837 when a fisheries report described its history. It had been built by the father of the present proprietor, it said, and had extended some 470 feet and had a lighthouse on the head. It also had an inner dock totalling around 620 feet. The pier had been slightly damaged (some trifling injury) at one time but this had led to its total destruction in a storm one night, due to it not having been repaired.

By 1837, the pier had been partially rebuilt to 300 feet but there was no mention of the lighthouse. I imagine its still a nice walk in the summer, particularly without the noise of trains disgorging westward bound families onto the quay.

(photo Brian Nolan)

The White Lady and the White Man

Mr and Mrs White. Please note the blue sky, which is quite the rarity for this blog. Photo taken from up on the Sky Road on the other side of the channel 

I've written about these two Connemara lovers before, gazing longingly at each other but I never got a picture of the two of them together.
The near beacon is the White Lady. She sits at the end of the promontory that marks the southern entrance to Clifden Bay, near a lovely, quiet little harbour of Errislannan and a beach full of the most perfectly rounded stones I've ever seen. Incidentally, the name Errislannan (Iorras Fhlannáin) is derived from the same saint, Flannan, who gave his name to the island and lighthouse in Scotland from where three lightkeepers mysteriously disappeared at the start of the twentieth century.

The White Lady's exact location is known as Fishing Point, probably because the fishing is supposed to be good there. Incidentally, one monologue from the beginning of the twentieth century calls her the Metal Man, which is only inaccurate on two counts. I haven't found any other instance of this name.
The beacon further out, known as the White Man, marks the Seal Rocks or Carrickrana, a reef that stretches a good half a mile and sits from six to twenty feet above high water. The beacon sits on the southeastern end of the cluster. Although they seem identical, it seems as though the top of the Lady is pointier than the Man.

The pointy-headed Lady ...

...and the flat-headed Man

In July 1876, the Commissioner of Irish Lights posted a notice for tenders for construction of the two beacons. On the 20th August 1877, a Notice to Mariners was issued, saying that two white stone (not metal) beacons had been erected to better mark the entrance of Clifden Bay. It also states that the Seal Rock beacon was thirty-six feet tall and placed on the southernmost part of the reef at a spot six feet above the high water mark. The NTM was reticent about the dimensions of the beacon at Fishing Point and makes no reference to the sex of either. 

Yet they've been gazing at each other for 147 years...

The White Man at Carrickrana. Does it look like the he is sitting on a bridge like the house at Ambleside? Photo Graham and Dairne at World of Lighthouses

The goats of Inishtearaght

 

Aside from humans, the two animals that were deliberately imported to Tearaght were rabbits and goats. All three were probably introduced at the same time. The rabbits were the rare Silver Grey variety and were a great boon, particularly at Christmas in an age where rabbit far superceded fowl as a Christmas and Sundays dish. They appear to have survived for 150 years though latterly there have been concerns for their existence. Puffins find it easy to evict rabbits from a basic burrow, so they only really survive in well-constructed burrows, and even then the gulls and ravens kill many of the young.

A pair of milking goats were introduced onto the island in 1870, the year of the lighthouse's establishment. In Beam 12/1 (roughly 1981), Dr. Gerald A Watson of UCC talked about the goats. He said that from this originally pair, roughly 35 goats had been spawned by 1895. (I'm not great on zoology or, indeed, the reproductive system, but would 'milking goats' not need to be female?)

Photo Joe O'Brien 2024

His point was that, although goats might be a good source of fresh milk and, in dire straits, food, they were not great for the ecosystem. They ate all the grass on the island and had become a terrible nuisance. Up until that year, hay had been imported annually, but from 1895 this practice ceased and there was a massive cull of the goats. At least 20 were transferred to nearby Inis Mhic Aoibhleáin (Charlie Haughey's island) but many more were slaughtered.

(A completely different account was given by a young girl, Annie O'Leary, in a letter to the Weekly Irish Times about a bad storm in 1894 - "It was a terrible destruction. the houses were washed nine feet with sea, also the lighthouse. All the goats out of forty died of starvation, because the grass was swept off with the gale, and 31 kids, all but one little kid, her name was Gin.")

John McCarron, son of lightkeeper Edward, spent four years as a child on Tearaght in the 1880s. Writing sixty years later, he remembers the 30 or so goats, which provided milk for most of the year, being supplemented  with condensed milk.

Whatever about the demise of the goats, it appears that the herd was regularly culled to keep the numbers to around twelve. Sometimes a retiring keeper might be given a gift of one. Rounding the goats up for milking was a hazardous occupation - keeper Denis Carroll plunged to his death in 1913 engaged on this task.

Photo Joe O'Brien 2024

1951 was the watershed year for the goats. Three things happened: -

1. A fridge arrived on the island
2. Two non-climbing keepers were transferred there and
3. Tinned and dried milk became available. (One wonders how they packaged the condensed milk in the 1880s)

As a result, little interest was taken in the goats and, by 1956, when Eugene Gillen returned to the island, he could not believe the destruction done there. With the grass eaten, the soil was no longer anchored to the rock and had been blown to the four winds. Again, a cull had to be undertaken.

There were 12 goats on the island in 1974 and the same when Dr Watson arrived to study the microculture of the island. He said he saw a group of goats working in tandem with their hooves to dig up half an acre of ground to get at the roots of the white sea campion. The resulting loss of soil and the calcium therein was extremely detrimental to the eco-culture of the island, he said. The goats in the winter probably survived, like the reindeer of the frozen tundra, on lichen.

In Blasket Spirit (2009), Anita Fennelly stated that 'the keeper's nanny goat, who used to chase Paud O'Connor every time he returned to the island, is dead.' Whether she knew that for a fact or was only surmising, I have no idea.

The humans are gone. The rabbits may survive. Are the goats still there? I doubt it. But maybe someone can set the record straight.

1906 Commissioners' inspection (NLI)

The old Dun Leary pier light (lost lighthouse)

 

There has been a harbour at Dún Laoghaire, then called Dunleary, since medieval times, though this would have been used only by small fishing boats. In later years, from at least as early as the 17th century, some passenger boats called in at the harbour to avoid the difficulties of accessing Dublin port. By the 18th century, some forty coal boats were trading with ports in England and to facilitate this a new pier was built in the 1760s, supervised by the military engineer, Charles Vallancey. The pier that commenced in 1817 had no connection with the old harbour at Dunleary, however, but was designed solely as a means of providing shelter for the safety of shipping during major storms. The port of Dublin was difficult to access due to a sand bar that ran across the mouth of the Liffey and, as there was nowhere else in Dublin Bay capable of sheltering ships, there were hundreds of wrecks in the bay over the centuries.

As stated, the 1760s pier was often frequented by coal boats coming from South Wales and thus became known as the Coal Pier. In the 1st edition OS map above (1843?) it is clear that it was situated near to the start of the West Pier. There had been a Martello Tower nearby as well. The Coal Pier had also been prone to silting too, prior to the building of the new harbour and was also known as the Dry Pier. It is still there today.

The above map from 1813 shows the old harbour prior to the commencement of work on the East and West piers. The Martello Tower can be clearly seen. Apparently there was a light on the end of the old pier, though whether it dated back to the building of the pier in the 1760s, or had been originated in the early 1800s, is uncertain. Nor do we know what sort of light it was, or the fuel used or the tower that housed it. All that we know for certain is that, when the East Pier reached out further to sea than the old pier, the light on the end of the old pier was discontinued.

The plate at the top of the page is dated 1st January 1799. Did the pier have a light at this stage? When you zoom in on the roundel at the end of the pier though, it shows a man holding a stick and the other arm indicating the way into the harbour. Whether its a real man or a statue is difficult to ascertain, but it does remind me of the Metal Man in Tramore and Sligo!

The Inishowen Maritime Museum (and Planetarium)

The Foreland buoy which once sat at the entrance of Belfast Lough. There is/was a Foreland Buoy sitting outside the Mizen Centre in county Cork for many years. I have no idea if this buoy is the same one, and it has been transferred to Greencastle, or another one

The price to pay for getting to see the lighthouses on Inishtrahull was a long journey up and a long journey back. Landing back at Bunagee Pier in beautiful sunshine, I was half minded to drive straight back and get it over with but decided that I had long wanted to see the Inishowen Maritime Museum in nearby Greencastle and God only knew how long it would be before I was up this way again.

I have to say, I made the right decision. The Museum is situated on the front at Greencastle, looking out over the harbour. Don't take the road to the harbour if the ferry to county Derry is in or you'll end up blocked in. Take the little road to the front a couple of hundred yards south and turn left!

For many years, I used to dread museums. Boring. Rather be out playing football. But now, it appears I am actually growing up, at least in this aspect.
The museum is small, on two floors. Plenty of reading, plenty of exhibits. I particularly liked the Greencastle yawl and would have liked to read more about it, as it seems every stretch of coastline in Ireland had its own style of boat but the long journey beckoned and I went upstairs to the lighthouse section.

It contained quite a number of exhibits, including semaphore bats, which I'd only ever seen pictures of. There were photographs of local keepers at Shroove and information about them. I learned that a keeper called JJ 'Sean' Doherty also worked on Eagle Island in 1987-88. Good job I hadn't finished that book. There were parabolic reflectors and racons and sun valves and a fog signal timing mechanism and other pieces of equipment I didn't really understand. But it was nice to put a face on the name.

Outside there was a Tunn's Buoy Lantern Unit, various buoys, a mushroom anchor thingy and a bell buoy. 

The only thing that disappointed me was that I was the only person in the place. I mentioned it to the girl on the desk and she said it was maybe a combination of the good weather and the All-Ireland Final. Normally on a Sunday its busier, she said. For €6, it was great value for money and the next time up, whenever that may be, I'll certainly spend more time there.

By the way, I never got to see the planetarium, but doubtless it's full of interesting planets.

The keepers of Poer Head, a blind dog named Fido and a kitten

 

Poer Head Fog Signal station 2014

It is now ten years since I visited Poer Head, famously one of only two Irish Lights stations that didn't have a light. (Mizen Head was the other but that was lit in 1959. You could theoretically also count Inishtrahull, which had a light at one end of the island and a fog signal at the other, until the new light was erected) The fog signal here was established in 1879 to help keep safe the notoriously foggy shores of East Cork but its lack of a light, together with its location in a very sparsely populated part of the country meant it very much went under the radar. In fact, not only did very few of the neighbours know about it, but sometimes even its keepers had never heard about it. I wrote about Poer Head previously here
The end for Poer Head came in 1970. This is an account of the closure as recorded by the Irish Examiner 15th October of that year.

And to round things off, because the story of lighthouses is very much the story of the keepers, a few of the men who served at that isolated spot during those 91 years. This is not a complete list (any additions welcome) and represent the results of a quick search of my database. Years mentioned are those when they were actually there - their terms could have lasted longer either before or after.

The keepers' cottages 2014

Three rarely seen pictures of the landing place (Joy and Patrick Tubby 2023): -

Commissioners and keepers walking up the same steps 117 years previously

The fog station CIL 1906

Dismissed

Tuskar Rock (photo Damien Mcaleenan)

There is one word in the whole spectrum of lighthouse research that makes you sit up and wonder what the hell happened. A simple two-syllable word that, within it, masks a whole intriguing story.

Dismissed.
Was he drunk? Or insolent? Did he bugger the bursar, to use an elegant phrase from Educating Rita? But then you need to dig deeper. Why was he drunk? Why was he insolent? And so on. Chances are, you'll never know because the incident happened so far back in time that only a much-garbled and one-sided tale may have survived over the centuries.

But I still feel a frisson of excitement when I see that word, as I did recently when surveying Alan Hayden's wonderful Skellig List, which I will write about in full in due course. Quoting one of the journals from 1834, relating to one of the stations at Skellig Rock, he writes

 

CIL B/1/7/19 Carroll admonished & Hatton dismissed for negligence and frequent absences

Owen Carroll, I am assuming, was the principal keeper at either the upper or the lower station and John Hatton was his assistant. Presumably, Hatton was the transgressor and Carroll was admonished for allowing the situation to continue without informing the board. But was there more to the story?

There is some debate as to John Hatton's birthplace. Some say it was Dublin, others say it was Worcester in England. Whatever. He married Sarah Connell, daughter of a solicitor!, probably in Dublin, and their children, for whom I have records, were Sarah b. December 1822, while the family was living at Moore Street; Agnes, April 1824, Granby Row; John, May 1825, Britain St, who died aged 3 months; and another John in March 1827. The family was protestant and all children were baptised at St Mary's C of I church in Dublin. (For those of you who know Dublin, it's the church next to the Jervis Centre on Mary's Lane that is now a bar or restaurant or something.)

St Mary's Church, Mary Street

The addresses suggest that father, John, was not a lightkeeper. However, by 1832, he appears to have thrown in his lot with the Ballast Board. Michael Costeloe, Irish Lights historian, reported in Beam 30 that

Shore dwellings for the Tuskar Lightkeepers and their families were built in 1817 at Ballyhire, half way between Greenore Point and Carnsore Point. On 28 March 1832 the Inspector of Lighthouses, George Halpin, visited Tuskar Lighthouse to investigate charges of embezzling oil and other lighthouse stores brought against William Richardson, Principal Keeper, and James Dowling, Assistant Keeper, by the other Assistant Keepers, John Hatton and Henry Browne.
A special meeting of the Board to consider these charges was held on 12 June 1832 and the outcome was the dismissal of the two accused Keepers, the charges ‘having been proved after a very minute investigation’.

Reading between the lines, I wonder if John Hatton was the main instigator of the allegations, as his name precedes Henry Browne. This would lead one to think that John was not new into the service but already had a couple of years under his belt. To be fair, Halpin was nothing if not a very fair-minded man and it would appear the specifics of the charges were justified. Michael Costeloe goes on to say that

Two days later at their regular meeting the Board considered a report from Inspector George Halpin referring to the residences built for the convenience of the Light Keepers and their families’ at Ballyhire, stating: "this indulgence they have generally abused by living in a state of great dissention to the annoyance of the neighbourhood and the disgrace of the establishment, occasionally bringing persons from the shore and leaving them though unfit in discharge of the Light House duty while the Keepers were on shore thus endangering the many valuable lives and immense property depending on the maintenance of the Light at this important station . . . "
Halpin recommended disposing of the houses at Ballyhire, observing that "the Light Keepers being constantly on the Rock will be effectually prevented from idling on shore and forming improper acquaintences [sic] in the country: the duty of the Light House will be properly attended to, and the means and temptation to make improper use of the stores will be much diminished."

One assumes that the two instances were related and the embezzlement of oil and stores directly led to the sale of the shore houses. It is hard to see how transferring the families to the rock would have helped the 'dissention,' though, with the two main culprits dismissed, the situation night have eased anyway.

Incidentally, I love the notion of bringing their drinking buddies out to the light to mind it, while they busied themselves with 'idling.' That shows true class.

The 1817 keepers' cottages where the disgraceful behavior emanated

It would appear that John Hatton was spared bringing his young family onto the tiny Tuskar Rock, for Sarah Hatton had a baby on Skellig Rock on 15th March 1834, one of the first to do so. Elizabeth Eleanor Hatton was baptised in Valentia two weeks later and the next we hear of the family is the dismissal of John for 'negligence and frequent absences'.

The old Upper Skellig light

There is, of course, the suspicion that the Ballast Board members were getting revenge for the upsetting of the apple-cart at Tuskar. Although they would have publicly said that he had done the right thing, privately they may have not been enamoured by the lack of loyalty and camaraderie shown, especially if it ended up costing them money and losing two good keepers. But I have faith in Halpin and hope that the charges were justified.

On 27th December 1835, Elizabeth Eleanor was re-baptized at St. Mary's in Dublin, the family living at Paradise Row (which, I'm sure, was as far from Paradise as you could possible get) Father, John, was listed as a coachmaker. A note in the margin of the marriage register explains the child had previously been baptised at Valentia.

Some time in the next 20 years, the family left Paradise for New South Wales. Skellig baby Elizabeth married Conrad Appel in Sydney in 1858. Sarah and Negligent John died in 1889 and 1890 respectively.

The first Wicklow Head low lighthouse

The first Wicklow Head high lighthouse

Anyone who has visited the beautiful Wicklow Head conurbation of lighthouses will know there are two former, and one current, lighthouses on the site. I won't bother detailing anything - its all here. 

(Okay, very quickly, the first high and low lights were established in 1781. They were similar in design, though the low light was smaller.

By 1818, it was realised the rear light (pictured above) was built at too high an elevation so they discontinued it and built two new lighthouses. The new high light was built roughly where the old lower light was situated (the old lower light was knocked) The new lower light was built further down the cliff, where it is still operational today. 

In 1865, the newer upper light was discontinued)

Old photograph of the three towers on Wicklow Head. Top centre - the old rear light; middle, the new rear light; bottom right, the new, and now only lower light)

Problem was, where exactly had the old lower light been? I had pondered the problem here but, although it is less than an hour way, it was not until Heritage Day 2025 that I got a chance to check. Fortuitously, I met Brendan Patrick Eoin Conway, who is the Irish Landmark Trust manager there, as well as having been a former keeper himself. I addition, he had grown up on the Head as his father, also Brendan, had been keeper there.

Brendan pointed out the 'new' High light out the window. If you look just to the right, from here, he said,  you'll see part of the foundations of the old light. Most of the new tower was built on top of the old one but a small portion is still visible.

And lo and behold, there it was - all that remains of the missing 4th lighthouse! It apparently was very similar to the Upper Light at the top of the page, perhaps a bit smaller.

Seeing as the new (1818) upper light was built in practically the same location as the old lower light, I've never been able to figure why they simply didn't use the old tower?

Seaward view from the top of the old High light

Well recommended. Not your usual lightkeeper's book!!