Pete's Irish Lighthouses

Okay, not the most visually stimulating of navigational lights but I include it here as a blatant plug for Ballydavid on the eastern side of Smerwick Bay, on the northern side of the Dinle peninsula. Ballydavid is quite off the beaten track and is very small but has a lot going for it, including a lovely safe sandy beach, a very picturesque pier and harbour, great community spirit and a couple of beachfront pubs serving creamy pints of Guinness. Mount Brandon, its top almost permanently shrouded in mist, in the background.

A few days walking holiday down on the Dingle peninsula in early June and I managed to inveigle my travelling companions, Aiden and Brenda, to climb Carhoo Hill near the western entrance of Dingle harbour to reach Eask Tower. We had been able to see the edifice on top of the hill from back at the Conor Pass but my attempts to describe the structure met with puzzlement. "Its built of solid stone and its rounded at the top kind of like a silo and it has an arm sticking out...." "So its a statue" "No, its a beacon." When we finally got there, Brenda described it much more eloquently as "a big stone Dalek." It can be reached by branching left from the Ventry Road at Ballymore, 4km west of Dingle. Unfortunately it isn't signposted, so you have to hope you have the right road. You don't see the tower for at least a kilometer but when you do, you should be heading for the left of it. The path to the top is well signposted and there are sp...

I have started rounding up all the research I did on my wife's Behan and Kane ancestry with a view to bringing out a small book for the family. One of her antecedents, a lady with the infuriatingly common name of Catherine Byrne, hailed from a place called Barnacullia, which is situated, as per the Dublin tradition of giving directions by pubs, in between Lamb Doyles and Johnny Fox's. To get there, probably by the M50, its a bit of a rigmarole. Come off the motorway and at the end of the slip take the first exit at the roundabout down the R133  towards Marlay Park. You're kind of doubling back on yourself here. After about 2kms, you take a left at a set of lights, signposted for Stepaside and Glencullen on the R822. Shortly after, at another set of lights, you need to turn left on the R113. Follow this road back over the M50 until you come to Lamb Doyle's pub, after about 1.6 kms. Take a right and keep going up. The road is narrow and you may need to stop o...

Its now April 2017 and a long winter nearly done. Its time I was sharpening up this blog in preparation for a new lighthouse-bagging season which, hopefully, will be more productive than last year. First up is a visit to Rossaveal in county Galway, which was made at the end of October last year but, because the maritime aids are less aesthetically pleasing than the beacons of the previous post, I didn't want to leave them up as my home page over the winter. This is Rossaveal. Not much in Rossaveal except for a pub where I got my dinner and a harbour. These are the front and rear markers to guide vessels into Rossaveal harbour situated above the approach road to the harbour. The harbour of course is the main point of departure for ferries to the Aran Islands and Inis Mor in particular. I was debating whether to do Inis Mor and potentially bag three 'official' lighthouses but the sailings didn't quite work out. Plus it was as foggy as hell. This is...

On a misty, murky day in late October, I took advantage of a trip to the Baffle Poetry Festival in Loughrea to take in some navigational lights around the Rossaveal / Lettermore areas of county Galway. I was actually heading for Lettermullan at the time when I crossed the first of several bridges that cross the archipelago. The bridge connects the mainland with the first island of Annaghvaan and I was gobsmacked to find, both to the north and south of the bridge, a number of stone beacons, seemingly scattered at random in the water. They reminded me a bit of the stone beacons along the River Boyne entrance   although with several differences. The Boyne beacons are neater and have rounded tops while the beacons in the (Beala) dangan Gap are very weathered and resemble giant sandcastles. The photo above shows the remains of an old causeway that pre-dated the first bridge which was built in 1836. The channel between the island and the mainland was / is only navigable aro...

Well, its been an incredibly slim-pickings year for this blog, not having had the opportunity of visiting any of the coastal communities around Ireland. A late September hiking trip to the Iveragh peninsular (Ring of Kerry) offered up these pitiful few photos. We were hiking around Derrynane, ascended a cliff at the west end of the townland and below us caught a glimpse of Bealtra Bay. There appear to be two markers, red and green at the outer entrance of the bay and then a third stone pillar nearer to the quay, probably to line up the correct approach to land. The bottom picture gives a decent view of the relationship between the three. As things happened, it was a dull and drizzly day, that resulted in dull and drizzly photographs.

Roger Reilly has spent the last year or so illustrating the lighthouses around the coast of Ireland. The body of work that he has produced is quite amazing and the results of his work can be found here and here . When I think that my blog involves finding the lighthouses and then taking a few quick amateur snaps, the months of effort that must have gone into the design and production of these posters is truly amazing I give examples here of three of his posters, all of which are available for purchase. Roger has done over sixty sea and harbour lights around the coast and they are available as a poster of 16 or singly. If your ancestor was a lighthouse keeper, or if you hail from a particular coastal part of Ireland, or if you simply like the vivid colour of the posters, they'd be a great purchase, particularly at this time of the year. I should point out that Roger's work is not limited to lighthouses but encompasses many cultural areas of Irish life.