Pete's Irish Lighthouses

Copper Point lies on the very eastern tip of Inis Fada (Long Island) and it marks the entrance to the harbour at Schull. I had passed it by twice, once on the Schull to Cape Clear Ferry and once on the Fastnet boat cruise from Schull in 2012 but there is nothing like getting right up to a light and, in this case, I did actually end up hugging it! This post is basically an excuse to show some current photographs of it. Access to the lighthouse is over the grass, across the stepping stones and then blindly follow the rope until you hit the big white thing Long Island (be careful when you google it because apparently there's another albeit less well-known Long Island in New York) gets its name for its relative length (5kms) to its width (under 1 km) There were apparently 300 people living there in the 1800s but now the number  barely reaches double figures. Most of the inhabited houses are clustered around the little harbour on the north side of the island, barely a five minute boat ...

Fanad lighthouse June 1906 - on some of the lighthouse tours of inspection at the start of the twentieth century, Sir Robert Ball brought along a panorama camera to record the experiences. The results are in a series of CIL Panorama Albums, now in the National Library. This photo is from Panorama Album D. A lot of the records at the Military Archives have now come online and have shed a lot of light on the period from the Easter Rising to independence. Of particular value are the witness statements, made many years afterwards, which not only shed light on the military shenanigans but are also crucial to understanding the philosophy of the times, the social world and the architecture of the early 1920s Ireland. I recently came across a witness statement by one Joseph P. McGinley, who served in the Volunteers and later became a TD in the 2nd Dail. He recounted his times with the No. 1 Brigade, 1st Northern Division, and I here reproduce his account of a raid in Fanad. At the end of Augu...

Grohogue Point at the entrance to Glandore Harbour, now lighthouse-less. There are few pleasures in life greater than finding a tenner in the pocket of a jacket that you haven't worn since last September. So, in a similar vein, I was delighted, last month, to discover, in the quagmire of the folder named 'Lighthouses' on my pc, a clipping, misfiled, detailing the carry-on at the annual meeting of the Glandore Harbour Lighthouse Board in 1912. Glandore Harbour looks to be a fantastically beautiful place slightly west of Galley Head lighthouse in county Cork. I have never been but Google Street Map is a great invention, even though its a bugger to read road signs on. The harbour is home to three major settlements, Union Hall, Leap and Glandore (in clockwise order) and a pile of magnificent scenery. Glandore itself was a busy enough fishing port back in the day. Mackerel was the main catch - it was salted and exported to England and America in barrels. So, I started looking in...

A couple of weeks ago, I finally 'bagged' Crookhaven lighthouse, meaning that the only mainland lighthouse I have not visited is St. John's Point in county Donegal. A trip there is therefore in order and while I'm there, I would hope to get good views of Rotten Island and Rathlin O'Beirne. However, I recently came across another long-lost lighthouse along that stretch of coast, which requires further investigation, mainly because the only information I have on it is a single sentence from a newspaper article 199 years ago. Saunders Newsletter 2nd January 1822 So, now you know as much about the Bruckless lighthouse as I do. Bruckless lies at the head of the bay prior to Killybegs, as per the map below. The lighthouse that is shown adjacent to Carntullagh Head is Rotten Island, a misnomer if ever there was one, which was established in 1838, sixteen years before Nesbitt's long-forgotten aid to navigation. In the second, close-up map of Bruckless Bay from that peri...

  The Kish lightship in the first decade of the twentieth century. To me this looks like the Cormorant but, hard to believe, I have been wrong in the past. Lightships were painted black until the 1950s, when red got the contract. B ack to 1902, the lightship on the Kish Bank, just outside the entrance to Dublin harbour, gained headlines worldwide when, on 8 th September of that year, she was sunk by the Royal Mail Steamer Leinster in dense fog. Neither party saw the other until a collision was unavoidable and the lightship – The Albatross – was practically split in two by the force of the collision.   The seven men aboard the stricken lightship – William Daly (Master), seamen William Duff, Patrick Langan, Michael Crowe, George Warren and Joseph Pluck and the carpenter, John Day – had been on board about a week and calmly and quickly lowered the lifeboat and rowed away. They were picked up by the Leinster and brought to Kingstown (Dun Laoghaire), seemingly none the wors...

  Sherkin Island lighthouse and the troublesome fog bell (I have no idea where this photograph came from) In less than ten days, I shall be heading down to the Mizen peninsula in West Cork for our annual hiking break and I hope to be getting up close and personal with the Copper Point lighthouse on Long Island and also Crookhaven light, one of the few that I haven't ticked off. Unfortunately our itinerary means it will be unlikely that I will get anywhere near Ireland's laziest island, Sherkin Island, and its cast iron lighthouse.  I have actually seen the lighthouse at Barrack Point twice - once from the Baltimore Beacon on the other side of the entrance to Baltimore Harbour and once from the Baltimore to Cape Clear ferry. But never close up. From around 1881, the Skibbereen and Baltimore Harbour Board were petitioned to erect a lighthouse at the entrance to Baltimore Harbour. A local priest and board member, Fr. Charles Davis, was the chief agitator for this. There was a n...

When I started visiting Irish lighthouses, they seemed a most unwelcoming lot. The yellow 'Trespassers will be shot' signs were often placed a long way up the roads to the lighthouse, thus ensuring you couldn't take photos from different angles. You got one shot from outside the gates and that's your lot. Now turn around and go away. (I must confess, I always saw the yellow signs as a challenge rather than a deterrent, the way Dougal viewed the red 'Do not press' button in the aeroplane. And it will always be on my conscience, if I had one) Slowly, though, the times are a-changing and CIL are starting to understand that a lot of people like lighthouses and there's a tourist potential there. Plus it's somewhere unusual and educational to bring the kids. Hook, Fanad, Loop Head, Mizen Head, Ballycotton and Valentia are now open to the public for at least most of the summer months and fantastic places they are too. However, the good news is that during lockd...