“It was absolutely normal for us,” he recalls. He would not see his father for months at a time. His grandfather Laurence was a captain on a lightship, and his father, also called Laurence, was a lightkeeper who would spend months away from his family on “the rock” – the generic name given to many of the more extreme lighthouse locations in Ireland. They had to know how to swim, to make do and to cook at a time when men made a virtue of not being able to cook.īutler’s mother was an assistant lightkeeper who managed to find the time to raise 15 children. They learned signalling, semaphore and Morse code. Lightkeepers wore uniforms, the training was military-like in its nature, they had ranks – supernumary, assistant and lightkeeper. Lightkeeping is traditionally a multigenerational activity in Ireland. "I loved how close to nature you could be. He speaks of "loving the aloneness" of his erstwhile life, which he chronicled in his book, The Lightkeeper: A Memoir, published in 2012. The 68-year-old now works as an attendant keeper on the Kish lighthouse in Dublin Bay, maintaining the generators and the back-up battery. "A microchip did away with my job," laments Gerald Butler, who was a lightkeeper for 21 years. Great lighthouses of Ireland: Eagle Island, off Co Mayo ‘Loving the aloneness’ Prior to the introduction of electricity, lightkeepers had to hand-pump paraffin vapour under pressure to the top of the lighthouse to illuminate the lamp. Ireland’s lighthouses have been fully automatic since 1997. It gives them greater spatial awareness,” he says. It came across very strongly in our recent consultation that mariners value the visual aid. If they see a lighthouse, that’s confirmation of what they are getting from their satellite navigation system. Take a ship making landfall on a dirty night at sea. They value lighthouses as something very stable and solid. "It's a question we get asked all the time," says Capt Robert McCabe, the director of navigational services for the Commissioners of Irish Lights, the all-Ireland body which manages the 66 working lighthouses around the island. Nowadays, ships use the global positioning system, radar, radio and telephone. It comes as a pleasant surprise to many that lighthouses still exist in an age when even a smartphone is a navigational tool beyond the comprehension of previous generations. Yet just a short walk away down a curved path is the modern-day Wicklow Head lighthouse, which casts a soft LED beam on the waters of the bay and the headland around. Wicklow Head is what many people consider lighthouses to be: lonely sentinels of our island status, beautiful objects lovingly created in a bygone era, but irrelevant in the modern context. Their only link to the outside world was a black and white television and a UHF telephone Instead, it was kept as a landmark and renovated in 1996 as the only lighthouse tower in Ireland in which one can spend the night. It lasted as a lighthouse for only 25 years. The original Wicklow Head lighthouse was built in 1781, but was regularly obscured by fog. Gradually, the lights of Wicklow town fade out to be replaced by the six window lights of Wicklow Head lighthouse, one for each floor of this magnificent octagonal granite tower. The 2km path is only wide enough for one vehicle and is banked on either side by hedges and stone walls. The road to Wicklow Head lighthouse feels like a departure from civilisation.
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