Categories
Events

Old Head of Kinsale Lighthouse

The lighthouse at the Old Head of Kinsale will be open for public tours on 31st August and 1st September 2024.

The cost of entry is €15/adult (family ticket available). No pre-booking is required. The funds raised are for the Lusitania Museum & Old Head Signal Tower.

Categories
Events

Culture Night 2024

Culture Night 2024 takes place on 20th September 2024. I’ve had a look through the Culture Night events lists and there isn’t much from an IH perspective – only identifying 2 events as follows:

DUBLIN

Turlough Hill 50th Birthday Bash

KERRY

History & Culture Tour at the Creamery

Both events require pre-booking – the relevant links are on the event pages above.

Categories
Events

Heritage Week 2024

I have done another review of the Heritage Week listings and have updated the events page to reflect this.

Categories
History

Kilkenny Mills, Kells

RTE has put an archive segment from 1984 on their website, reporting on the Kilkenny Mills in Kells, Co. Kilkenny.

Categories
General

Drones and IH

One of the many things on my to do list is to learn how to fly a drone, given the enormous possibilities it offers in the arena of IH recording.

In advance of that happening (no scheduled date unfortunately), I link to this Youtube channel, by the name of DroneHawk, (I don’t know who the owner/content creator of the site is) which has excellent footage of both recent engineering works, such as the Dunkettle interchange/Foynes railway relaying and footage of historic railway alignments.

Categories
IH News 2024

Meelick Weir facilities

The Connacht Tribune reports on the absence of public facilities at or near the Meelick Weir walkway.

Whilst complimentary about Waterways Ireland’s part in restoring the walkway along the weir, they note that WI have not provided any facilities for those caught short.

When I was in Clones recently, looking at the new addition to the waterways of Ireland, I did notice the toilet block in Clones which was built as part of this. I am at a loss to understand why similar could not be provided at or near the Meelick Weir, especially as there does appear to be a control building at Meelick Lock:

Categories
History

The Glendalough Railway

No, there was never a railway to Glendalough, Co. Wicklow. However, as with most places in Ireland of any significance, proposals to build such a line were made in the 19th Century.

The Greystones Guide has an article by Gary Paine about this.

Categories
General

Boating as a tourism activity

Proponents of the Ulster Canal Thon Sheugh like to tell us that this is a wonderful tourist attraction that will revitalise Clones and all other areas that the canal served.

Not only do I beg to differ (even the Cost Benefit Analysis of the “restoration” – which calculated a negative return – accepted that traffic on any restored navigation would be displaced from elsewhere in Ireland and not generate additional business overall), but it appears that boating activity on the one navigation in Ireland that should work for tourism (the River Shannon) is in decline.

Certain Leitrim county councillors are trying to blame this on fees charged by Waterways Ireland and are calling for the proposed fee increases that WI are seeking to be deferred.

From the Leitrim Observer (linked to above):

“The numbers have fallen from about 100,000 in the mid 1990s to 76,000 in 2004 and down to 36,000 in 2023. It looks like it’s going to dip under 30,000 this year,” explained Cllr Flynn.

https://www.leitrimobserver.ie/news/home/1557625/councillors-advocate-for-study-on-declining-traffic-on-river-shannon.html

If the premier boating resource in Ireland is seeing a natural decline in usage, what makes anyone think that a dead end canal to Clones will see sufficient activity to justify its restoration?

Categories
Locations

York Street Station, Belfast

The Slugger O Toole website has an interesting post about York Street Station in Belfast, asking a question that I also have, being why exactly did Translink feel the need to upgrade the station building?

Categories
Site Updates

The Ulster Canal

I was up in South Ulster yesterday and the day before, doing a quick photographic update of the bridges/locks of the Ulster Canal. I didn’t manage to complete this as getting beyond Caledon on 12th July wasn’t possible, due to a 12th day demonstration in Killylea. A shout out to the PSNI officers manning the road block at Caledon who were bemused by this Dubliner telling them he didn’t know where he was going but was following instructions from Google!*

I plan to add the photos of the Ulster Canal to the site shortly. In advance of having this update to the site ready, below is a photo I took near to the end of the canal at Wattlebridge, of a boat on a trailer adjacent to the canalbed. I genuinely hope that this is the closest to the Ulster Canal this boat gets.

Boat beside dry Ulster Canal at Wattlebridge, Co. Fermanagh

* The process I use in cases like this is I identify all sites I need to visit on a given day and download the latitude/longitude co-ordinates of these, in the right order, into a spreadsheet and copy/paste the co-ordinates in sequence into Googlemaps on my phone, to navigate from one to the other.