Pete's Irish Lighthouses

  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 i...

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...

  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rabbits were the rare Silver Grey variety and were a great boon, particularly at Christmas in an age where rabbit far superceded fowl as a Christmas and Sundays dish.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 b...

  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 c...

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 drea...

  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 keepe...

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,...

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 ligh...