By Hook or by Crook

Fethard Harbour

 What a glorious day in southern Ireland today. We set off from New Ross to go to our next accommodation near Kinsale in County Cork but of course travelled via the Hook Peninsula and Waterford. The Hook Peninsula was just magnificent with one breathtaking bay and headland after another.

On top of Hook Lighthouse -
trying not to get blown off

Baginbun Bay (don’t you just love Irish names) was the first stop – a quiet little idyllic sand bay that you could just imagine would have been a favourite for smugglers in days past. Actually given the signs around at the bay and in talking to one of the locals – the area is still a popular spot for people to smuggle things in (just so happens to be drugs now). We met up with this lovely old fellow who had fished for 64 years but retired last year when we visited Fethard Harbour the next stop of the day. This must be the smallest harbour in the world – 3 small trawlers and a couple of dinghies were moored inside the concrete walls of the harbour and it looked crowded! We had a good chat as he had come down to get his dose of ‘salt air’ for the morning. He seemed to take great delight in revealing about the new ones in town who had been arrested with drugs.

Baginbun Bay

We continued down the coast calling in to Slade before making our way to the Hook Peninsula and the oldest still operating Lighthouse in the world. The Monks had maintained a warning fire on the Peninsula from the 5^th century apparently and the current lighthouse was build around 1240 by William Marshall to guide his ships successfully to New Ross. The monks initially ran the lighthouse and probably helped with its construction. The first official lighthouse keeper arrived in the mid 1600s and it wasn’t until 1996 that the lighthouse was automated and there were no longer lighthouse keepers. We did a tour of the lighthouse and managed to not get blown off the top – but it was a near thing. In fact the howling wind today was the only thing that prevented Irish weather scoring a perfect 10 for the day.

View from our accommodation

Kinsale Harbour

After Hook Head Lighthouse we headed across the River Suir on the car ferry at Ballyhack and headed to Waterford. A tour of Waterford Crystal was fascinating, although we didn’t buy any – it would no doubt be in a thousand pieces by the time we got home. We didn’t realise that Waterford Crystal actually closed down for a hundred years and only recommenced in 1951. The apprenticeship is at least 5 years and can’t imagine it is a terribly healthy with all the lead dust around but maybe we are mistaken. We also made a visit to the Edmund Rice Centre in Waterford before heading to Oysterhaven Bay to the next delightful stay on our Irish journey.

Today’s Irish saying – ‘The markets are on every other Sunday’ (we have images of people coming along on any Sunday and enquiring about the markets to be told you should have been here last week). 

Love to all

S&E