Pete's Irish Lighthouses

There is a very old legend in Belfast of a large and brilliant diamond that shone from the large and dominant Cavehill that looms over the northen part of that city. The diamond reputedly shone from the face of the cliff and glinted so brightly that mariners used it to guide their ships into harbour (hence the lighthouse connection and the reason for its inclusion in this blog!) Not only was it a guiding light for the sailors, but it also besotted their thinking and they reputedly used to fire their guns at the hill in an attempt to dislodge the diamond. An equally impossible story has it that Finn McCool used to wear it as a watch guard until he dropped it on the hill. There were songs written about the diamond in the 1800s. In some, the diamond was a girl but in others it was an actual diamond. One jolly song has Diarmuid being egged on by Mary to climb the hill and get her the diamond, as proof of his love. This he does but falls to his death in the process, which is alw...

Le grand pain de sucre ( This post is a follyer-upper to the story of the actual Bray lighthouse ) Christ the Redeemer beams down famously on the citizens of Rio de Janeiro from his perch on the Sugarloaf Mountain, one of the great sights of the world. It is hard to believe that at one stage, Bray Town Council were seriously considering erecting a lighthouse on top of the Great Sugarloaf to beam down its benevolent light upon the people of Bray and, presumably, the sea beyond. But such was the case. Edmond Eduarde Fournier d'Albe The idea was the brainchild of one Professor Edmond Eduarde Fournier d'Albe who, as one can guess by his name, was an Irishman. Google the name, even the surname, and one will come up with a long list of ideas and mentions of this guy. He was primarily a scientist but had his finger in many pies and was indeed a celebrity figure in Dublin at the turn of the twentieth century.  The lighthouse idea was first broached after the de...

A couple of weeks ago, I came across a single line in an old newspaper from 1865. "The Wicklow fisherman haven't had a light in the harbour since the end of the pier was washed away three years ago." I researched this event, found a big storm that caused untold damaged to shipping in 1861 but couldn't find a word about the pier or the light. So I posted up on " Wicklow Past" s Facebook Page, asking if anybody knew about it. One of the replies came back to the effect that maybe I was confusing it with Bray lighthouse toppling into the sea in 1957. Whaaaaaaaaaaaaat?????? In all my years hunting out Irish lighthouses, extant and extinct, I had never once heard of a lighthouse in Bray. I immediately went on to " Bray - Did You Know? " - the Bray equivalent of Wicklow Past - and saw that, indeed, not only did Bray have a fine cast-iron lighthouse for sixty years but it's demise produced some of the most spectacular lighthouse photographs ...

Above and below is the Horse Rock Pile Light on the River Shannon, one of the very few totally wooden lighthouses on our coast that had living accommodation. The picture above comes from the Limerick Post in 2014;  the one below from the Sunday Independent in 1954, yet they are, of course, the same photograph. When you look at a map of the Shannon Estuary, where it meets the sea at Loop Head, it is pretty oceanic in its width, remaining quite navigable until it passes Beeves Rock - which should be on the list of Great Irish Lighthouses (oh, wait, it has no tourism potential) - after which it slowly narrows to little more than a trickle running from a drainpipe leading to Limerick City itself. This narrow part is called 'The Narrows.' In the first half of the nineteenth century, it was falling over itself with obstacles for the unwary mariner - submerged reefs, partially submerged mudflats - and not a light in sight. Conversely the first part of the Estuary - not ca...

As part of Belfast Harbour's opening of the 'New Straight Channel' in 1891, four new pile lights were built, roughly one mile apart from the Holywood Bank to the approach of East Twin Island, where two further land-bound lights were in existence.  We have already dealt with Pile Light No.1 (The Outer Light) which was larger than the other three; and Pile Light No. 2, which came a cropper in 1892 at the hands of the Medway , causing the deaths of the keeper and his six-year old son. Sketch of Pile Light No. 3 in 1892 It was a wooden lighthouse erected on cast-iron hollow piles and had been made as stable and secure as humanly possible with the help of cast-iron tie-rods. Like her three companions, she had live-in accommodation for a keeper and his wife, the reasoning being that it would minimise the danger of constant rowing back and forth to the light in heavy seas to light and douse the lamp. It showed a single fixed bright light. As we have seen, shipping ...

Okay, a short summary of Belfast lights to this point. 1844 - 1889 - Belfast Lough Pile Light 1851 - 1891 - Lighthouses 2) and 3) Pile Lights 1851? - 1965 - Lighthouse on the tip of East Twin Island 1850s - 1960s - East Twin Lighthouse 1891 - 1959 - Outer Pile Light No.1 - Replacing the 1844 Light 1891 - 1892 - Pile Light No.2 1891 - 1897 - Pile Light No.3 And so we have the fourth pile light built by Belfast Harbour Commissioners to light the new straight channel from the sea proper to the docks. It came into existence in 1891 and contained accommodation for a lightkeeper and his wife. What can I say about this magnificent structure? Well, it was identical to Pile Lights 2 and 3 in both size and shape and lights shown (green, fixed) Numbers 2 and 3 both got struck by vessels and were demolished with tragic loss of life. This is actually a drawing of No.2 Light. As it was identical to No. 4 light, I reproduce it here for decorative purposes. Maybe the No. 4 lightkeeper decided...

As we saw with Pile Light No.1, the massive harbour works in Belfast in the latter half of the twentieth century, during which they straightened up and dredged four miles of channel as well as constructing numerous docks and shipbuilding berths (including Harland and Wolff) necessitated new lighting. The old pile lights built between 1844 and 1851 were demolished and four new pile lights, imaginatively named 1,2,3 and 4, were built. The 'New Straight Channel' was formally opened in July 1891. This is the only representation of this very short-lived pile light that we will probably ever see. It is a detail in the larger sketch reproduced below. The light showed a fixed bright light, placed in an oriel window, visible through 180 degrees, a fact that was to feature in its destruction. Like its three companions, it was placed on the south side of the new channel at a distance of roughly one mile from Lighthouse No.1 and the same from No.3. In other words, it was the se...