Picking up from where the previous post (officially) left off, after a mere three and a half hours of very gentle crossing conducive to napping we arrived in Rosslare Harbour and clanged down the ramp of the ferry to begin our Ireland adventure by driving into the pouring rain. We were funnelled straight out onto the main road and as of course there was no plan of where to go once we got there, the chief navigator having been asleep on the job during the trip across. So the plan became to head to the town of Rosslare itself just along the road and find somewhere to park and get our bearings.
We found a nice spot at the top of a hill on the outskirts of town overlooking the sea from whence we had come, we could even see our ferry sitting there waiting to undertake the trip back again. The only other vehicle was another van from the UK waiting to make the trip back over so after having a chat with my fellow ex-pat I took a wander down the hill into town.
The upshot being we ended up staying for two days. Rosslare is a very small, very attractive place that has everything that you could wish for. The beach is lovely, there is great coffee, even better ice cream, good places to eat and the people seem very friendly. It is also incredibly clean and tidy and the following day when the sun emerged (and it’s been here ever since) it looked beautiful in the brightness. Locals were busy planting flowers and giving the facilities a new coat of paint. There was even a free bike workstation in the middle of the street with all the tools you could ever need attached and it remained shiny and unvandalised. This came in very handy to solve an under-inflation issue (the bike not me) that I had been sadly unable to address with my own pumping equipment.
So Rosslare was lovely, and when we finally did leave, it was to Kilmore Quay which deserves a shout out for the super friendly and helpful guys at the harbourmasters office for allowing me to get my laundry and showering done, and for the coffee shop over the road gifting me a Euro coin for the shower because I didn’t have any cash on me.
From there the next stop was Hook Head which has a lighthouse. But wait, not just any old lighthouse. Although it is certainly old, it’s believed to be the oldest working lighthouse in the whole wide world, built in the 6th century. The area of sea beyond the lighthouse is know as ‘the graveyard of a thousand ships’ so maybe they should have built it even sooner.
It’s a handsome construction, it’s sturdy black and white colouring set off nicely by the bright red rail at the top, and the surrounding landscape adds to the effect. The grey rock combined with the national green and the pink of the armeria or thrift complimenting it beautifully in the pictures.
There was also an information board showing ‘The Great Lighthouses of Ireland’ of which of course this was one. Now if there’s one thing I like it’s a quest, and so it was decided that Travis and I would undertake to visit and document every one of the twelve as we made our way around the coastline, the next one being in Ballycotton on the way to Cork.
So to date we have obtained one of twelve lighthouses in our collection and I thought that would be that and we would simply add to our collection as we went along until finally, at some point towards the end of the summer, we would have acquired the whole set. But of course a quest is rarely a straightforward affair, and one can reasonably expect a few twists and turns and challenges along the way.
So it was that when I went to the Great Lighthouses of Ireland website to diligently check a fact or two before uploading this that I discovered that they’ve since increased the number of great lighthouses to eighteen! So now we are somehow more lighthouses away from completing our quest than we were when we started! It barely seems logical but that’s about standard for an epic quest I suppose. One must sometimes go backwards before going forwards. Or something like that anyway. Hopefully our quest won’t go the same way as the thousand ships.