She arrived at the Galley with her husband Denis. She’s a playwright and wanted to write a play about a lightkeeper. I released my memoir called The Lightkeeper about 10 years ago.Īwhile back Irene Kelleher contacted me. With that time you can just sit and look at nature. Hermetic is the way I describe it as well. I liked the time it afforded for me to be creative with my hands and to read profusely. But yet, when it came to being a lightkeeper, after five years he found he could not handle the isolation. My twin brother and I were and are inseparable. That’s a strange thing because not everybody is comfortable on their own. If you liked the life, which I absolutely passionately loved, going out to a rock for a month was another holiday as well. It was beautiful in that you spent a month on the rock and then you had a paid holiday for another month. It wound up that we were coming back for a month then. In that time, you had to manage all your own cooking and wash your clothes, generally look after yourself. Every time you went out to a rock, you were there for 28 days. I was stationed out on the rock a few times. That parish lies along the coastline between Clon and Ross. It’s in the parish of Ardfield and Rathbarry. It’s between Rosscarbery and Clonakilty in Co Cork. She retired in 1997 and I took over then. An attendant lightkeeper is in charge of the maintenance of the lighthouse. But again, there was that attachment to working on the sea.Īt Galley Head, where my father had been last posted, my mother became the attendant lightkeeper. It was the complete opposite to what I had been doing, which was quite sedentary. But for some reason I absolutely loved it. It was physical and extremely strenuous work. When I was made redundant, I bought a fishing trawler and I became a fisherman for 10 years. I very quickly accepted life was moving on and I was also moving on. However, you cannot live in sadness and you cannot live in the past. It was the end of an era and I can only say I was saddened by it. Once electricity came in, the lights were electrified and with further technology they were completely automated. From there I was transferred to the Fastnet, the Old Head of Kinsale and to Mizen. After my training I was appointed as an assistant keeper to Bull Rock, which is off Dursey Island. I remained in the Irish Lights for 21 years. By then you were building a huge amount of experience with the different apparatuses, the different fog signals, etc. From there we were sent all around the coast to different lighthouses to do relief work. We did four years of on-the-job training at the Baily Lighthouse in Dublin. At the age of 19 I had done the entrance exam, medical exam and swimming exam, so I headed off up to Dublin and passed the interview. After that, all we wanted to do was be lightkeepers. My father, God rest him, brought myself and my twin brother out to Ballycotton. When we were up in Dundalk and in Ballycotton, my father was out on the rock.įrom when I was a little child, being a lightkeeper was all I wanted to do. You’ve two kinds of lighthouses, one is on a rock out in the water and the other is on a headland or peninsula. Then we headed up to Dundalk to a place called Mine Head near Dungarvan and then back to the Galley in 1965. That was where I started going to school at the age of four. From there we moved to Galley Head and Ballycotton. In the Irish Lights (the lighthouse authority) we moved around. My mother then was the daughter of a lightkeeper. This led to insanity and inevitably the loss of their job.įind out more about the life of the keepers in the stories attached to this page.My father was a lightkeeper and his father before him was a captain of the lightships. Mercury poisoning was a hazard in earlier centuries. However, the life of the keeper took its toll on some. Together the families worked, played, taught their kids, grew their own food and even made their own homebrew.įor outside contact they waited for the mail plane or monthly steamer to arrive, and reveled in the unique life they had. They moved from lighthouse to lighthouse around the coast. While the image of the lonesome keeper, trudging the stairs up the light tower all through the long wind-swept nights is partially true, many keepers had families who lived with them. Slowly the era of lighthouse keepers faded away. The last lighthouse to operate manually was remote and windswept Maatsuyker Island, the country's southern most light in Tasmania, which lost its keeper in 1995. With the advent of satellite navigation and automation of many functions, lighthouses were deactivated in 1983 and no more keepers were employed.
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