Islands of Ireland: Long Island in West Cork is one of Carbery’s mythical hundred isles

Though there are only a handful of permanent residents today in among the holiday houses of Long Island, it had a population of 305 people in 1841, writes Dan MacCarthy

Long Island, Schull, West Cork. Picture: Dan MacCarthy

While the subject of this week’s article evokes the other side of the Atlantic viz New York and its suburbs (it even has a companion Coney Island and nearby Baltimore) there the comparison must end lest someone knows of a Bronx or a Manhattan in the vicinity. 

This Long Island is one of at least five in the country with several on lakes to supplement those in counties Cork and Kerry. This one is a slender 5km and only just over half a kilometre wide. The standout feature of Long Island is its beautiful lighthouse at its eastern tip, Copper Point, which has, since 1865, guided mariners into the safe haven of Schull.

Its pretty name recalls the mines of the 19th century which once employed many on the islands and areas along the mainland opposite.

Though there are only a handful of permanent residents today in among the holiday houses, it had a population of 305 people in 1841. The combined population of the islands of Roaringwater Bay and Long Island Bay just before the Famine was 5,000 people. 

The US was a popular choice for emigrants and some went on to build successful lives there. Among them was the colourful Florence Driscoll (Big Flurry, 6' 3.5" tall) born on Long Island in 1837, one of 14 siblings. The Big was to distinguish him from Red Flurry, Black Flurry, Little Flurry and Mad Flurry.

“Big Flurry grew up in the crowded thatched hut of his father, learned to catch fish, to build and sail a boat to handle cordage and face the storms. He was a powerful lad and took no back talk from anybody,” writes Matthew Jockers in the introduction to the excellent account of Kansas Irish. Big Flurry’s father Con lived until the age of 104 by which time most of his children were in the States.

He emigrated to New York in the late 1850s to stay with an uncle before moving on to Kansas. If there was hardship at home during the Famine there was plenty more in the US for Big Flurry on his farm in the Sunflower State. Jockers wrote:

National depressions in 1873 and 1893, coupled with periodic tornadoes, floods, blizzards, disease and drought, made dryland farming a particularly risky business. 

However, the farm succeeded and Big Flurry and his wife Ellen raised a family. 

One of their children, Charles, went on to become a successful writer and was editor of the Wichita Eagle. He had a sideline in works on piracy and wrote several books including Driscoll’s Book of Pirates (1934) and Pirates Ahoy (1941). This is quite ironic as his birthplace, along with Baltimore, was at the centre of the major pirate base of the 17th century alliance of piracy in the North Atlantic. Goods were regularly transported between the HQ of the pirate William Hull in the townland of Leamcon and Long Island.

One of the best places to view this gorgeous island is on a small road west of Schull which gives a panoramic view of many of Carbery’s mythical hundred isles. In the distance are Sherkin and Cape Clear. Closer in, are the flat lines of the Calf islands and then Long Island itself which is enormous in comparison to Coney Island. Roaringwater Bay eventually merges with Long Island Bay.

This island, along with Castle Island, Horse Island, and Goat Island, forms a once-peninsula thrusting out to the Atlantic from Roaringwater Bay. The north-east to south-west aspect runs parallel to the mainland where the higher ground of the islands rise from the troughs of the seabed, all of which was above water prior to the last ice age. That period of sea level rise starting 10,000 years ago was augmented by what is known as the ‘great inundation of 822AD’ when, according to historical records, up to 1,000 people died and this string of islands were formed when a cataclysm (probably a tsunami) struck the coast.

• How to get there: longislandferry.ie 
• Other: Kansas Irish, Charles B Driscoll, Rowfant Press; The Alliance of Pirates: Ireland and Atlantic Piracy in the Early Seventeenth Century, Connie Kelleher, Cork University Press; schullseasafari.ie 
• With thanks to the great grand-daughter of Big Flurry, Deirdre McKee