THE tip of rock, Duncriffan Point, near the nose of Howth, on which the Baily Light is built, is the pivotal point for all shipping entering or leaving the port of Dublin. It is also the epicentre of all the contrary winds in Christendom. I lived for two years on Baily, researching and writing my book about Irish lighthouses and the people who worked them.
At night, shutters up, wind soughing round the three-foot-thick walls of the granite tower, sea sucking hungrily along the base of the cliff, one might as well be on some remote island. And when fog crept in, like giant puffs of smoke, across the sea, from the Kish sandbank, the great, diaphonic fog-signal relentlessly ground out its warning; echoing, basso profundo, along the cliff-face.
I worked alone, through many nights, on Baily, time forgotten, sustained by the work in progress. Above me, in the lonely tower, there was always a keeper on duty; I could check a fact, elicit an opinion, or just sit with him and listen to the disembodied voices on the short-wave receiver. And, often, from the big bay-window of the Watch Room, we would follow the little, moving islands of light that were ships, inward and outward bound; tracers on the natural radar screen of the pitch black sea, and marvel at the horse-shoe of lights round Dublin Bay.
The present light was established on March 17th, 1814, but there has been a light, of one kind or other, on Howth Head since the 9th century. At first the light was higher up the hill, at a place called the Green Bayly; a primitive, open fire on a mound of stones. Seven centuries later, it was a cottage-style light on the same spot, with accommodation for the keeper and his family - an accommodation that was used for mural" activities such as smuggling, illegal distilling and prostitution.
The present lighthouse was built, by George Halpin snr, in 1810, nearer sea level because fog and low cloud had often obscured the higher light from below.
Near the end of my time on Baily I suffered the first of seven heart attacks; these eventually led to a heart transplant. While waiting for the donor heart, I wrote this in a journal I kept of that traumatic time: "Pain-free albeit weak, going home to Glenageary, the sight of the lighthouse across the bay raises my low spirits. I make a resolve that, the transplant over, I will go back to Baily, climb the 70-odd steps to the top of the tower again, and know I have recovered."
And, six months later I did return, and climbed to the top of the tower, at sunset, and watched the great lantern revolve, its giant spokes of light sweeping sea and clifftop - the same lantern which had, metaphorically speaking, lit so many dark nights of the soul for me, as it languished in hospital and waited for a new heart. The same lantern which will continue, unfailingly, to shine night after night, across the maw of dark water that is Dublin Bay, its beam clearly-visible from my bedroom window. For, though the last keeper has gone now, we should be grateful the light remains lit, but abandoned, like some Mary Celeste, drifting in the dark.
The automation and de-manning of lighthouses is a sad affair. The lonely beacons, like Baily, on rocky promontories and off-shore rocks and islands, will be lonelier `still after the last keeper has gone. Leaving a lighthouse recently, after its automation, an old keeper.' "going ashore" for the last time looked back and down from our steeply rising helicopter at the slim, white spiral of the tower, dwindling into distance, and said to me: "Isn't it like a big white pencil stuck in the rock?" And that remark set me thinking. Thinking that light-keepers, working as they did a month on, and a month off, quite literally spent half their working lives living inside pencils stuck on rocks.
WHETHER the romantics among us like it or not, we must accept the inevitability of the progress that ultimately leads to automation. But I temper my acceptance by remembering what my friend John de Courcy Ireland. said, on the occasion of the de-manning of the Kish Light. For many years, he had been secretary of Dun Laoghaire life-boat, and in that time, to his certain knowledge, the keepers on Kish had, by their vigilance and quick human response in certain situations, saved at least 20 lives. A statement equally true of Baily, and a thought to ruminate on as we progress into the unwatched, state-of-the-art, sonar-singing dark.