Lighthouses: They're the light of Anne Doyle's life
“I remember when I was six or seven during wintertime when we would go to the back door of our house in Ferns, you would see this light sweeping across the sky. Daddy always said that it was the light of Tuskar Rock lighthouse,” she says.
“He may have been making it up. It probably was, though. In those days, there was not a lot of artificial light. This was even before there was electric light in our house. The idea appealed to me as a small child.
“Then, when I was about 10 years of age, we went on a school tour to Hook Head, and I just thought it was the most magical place. I also spotted the lighthouse keeper’s son. He was maybe 14 years of age and he was a lovely-looking young fella. I was only a small girl, but I remember admiring him from afar.
“Anywhere I’ve ever gone near a lighthouse, I always go along to see one. I have a good few books on lighthouses and I have loads of model lighthouses — people give me presents of them.”
The choice of Hook Lighthouse to stage the global gathering — a week after the Government announced a €2.5 million EU-funded project to harness 15-20 lighthouses around Ireland for tourist purposes — was obvious. Reputedly the world’s oldest operational lighthouse, it is an imposing piece of architecture, and one of Wexford’s landmarks.
“It’s iconic,” says Doyle. “It was a monk who put a fire in a basket there before anybody else even thought of lighthouses. Lighthouses tend to have spectacular scenery, but it’s a beautiful place.”
A monk named Dubhán, who established a monastery on Hook Head peninsula late in the fifth century, is believed to have lit a beacon on the site of the lighthouse, which helped to alert sailors to the dangers of shipwreck.
The headland became known as Rinn Dubháin, or Dubhán’s headland. Duán is the Irish word for fishing hook, which likely explains the Anglicised version in use today for Hook Head.
The lighthouse proper was built in the 1240s, according to the estate papers of William Marshall, one of the most powerful knights of the English court who succeeded his father-in-law, Strongbow, as Earl of Pembroke. Marshall constructed the lighthouse to guide his ships into Waterford Harbour.
The original lighthouse was 8 metres tall, 8.5 metres in diameter and had an open fire at the top as its beacon. Fog signals, bells were originally used in 1838. A few decades later, a cannon was used to fire warning shots off the cliff edges during fog. In 1911, clockwork was installed to change the beacon into a flashing light, which had to be wound every 25 minutes.
The last team of keepers left the lighthouse in March 1995, as it was fully automated. In 2011, Hook’s foghorn was turned off for the last time — the modern ship’s technology is so sophisticated that it had become redundant, along with the craft of resident lighthouse keepers.
Martin Murphy was one of the last keepers to work at Hook Lighthouse. He kept watch there from 1989 to 1994. His principal task was to maintain a light during darkness, and the lighthouse’s other navigational aids. Weather conditions had to be logged, lenses and brass work polished.
Murphy used to work on shifts with two other lighthouse keepers. They worked four hours on, with eight hours off. Invariably, there would be two people in bed with one person awake most of the time except for a few hours of crossover during the day.
“It was quite lonely,” he says. “It was a different kind of life. You had to have a certain temperament. You had to be fairly easy-going. Over the years, the job made people a bit eccentric because you spent a lot of time on your own, working in isolation. You had to deal with extreme events. Above all, you had to become self-reliant. Obviously when you were out there you had to do all your own cooking, et cetera.
Over his career, Murphy, who grew up near Hook Lighthouse, also worked for six-year stints on Inishtearacht, the outer Blasket Island, and Tuskar Rock, among other postings.
“You wouldn’t pass the time lightly in places like that,” he says. “You would have to have hobbies. What people did in their spare time was as important as anything else, to keep their sanity. People became very good artists, rug-makers, and makers of shillelaghs, of keyrings, and so on.
“Most of us played chess and scrabble. During the 2 to 6 watch at night, often one chess board would be set up on, say, the Fastnet lighthouse and another on Inishtearacht. People would play out their pieces, communicating by contact radio frequency between the two lighthouses, as if they were at the same station. Sometimes, you might not get the game finished and the board was left there with the pieces in the same place. After television came in, a lot of that changed.”
Murphy cites a November night in 1986 when the Kowloon Bridge, an iron-ore carrier longer than the South Mall in Cork, got into difficulties (and eventually sank near Castletownshend in Co Cork, a couple of weeks later) as the most hair-raising shift he put down. He was stationed at Mizen Head at the time.
“The ship got caught in a bad storm in Bantry Bay,” he says. “I was listening in on the ship’s shore radio. Apparently, there was some structural damage done. The ship tried to ride out the storm. Can you imagine how tall the Fastnet lighthouse is? Sometimes in a storm on a night like that you might not see the lighthouse, looking out from Mizen Head, the sea would be so rough.
“There was another vessel in Bantry Bay that night, the Capo Emma. She had a very large load of crude oil on board. Everyone would have been very concerned in case anything happened to that particular vessel because if a load of crude oil got loose on the shoreline, the entire region was in trouble. Safety and speed were the issues — we had to act fast, to get the rescue service involved and so on.”
Murphy, who is one of the organisers of the Lighthouse Keepers’ Global Gathering, says he rarely gets together with his old colleagues as they’re all dispersed. As well as his old friends, he says he misses the sounds of the sea, the sounds of boats, and one other thing.
“Being out in the eye of a storm — that was a great sensation. You’re not in a ship, you’re in a very, very well-built tower. You don’t have any safety concerns so you can enjoy it.”
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