The invention of hot air balloon travel in the 1780s was an international sensation, and intrepid individual aeronauts quickly took on the challenge of trying to complete increasingly daring journeys. However, efforts to cross the Irish Sea for the…

From the first manned hot air balloon flight in Paris in November 1783, balloons exerted a powerful force on the public imagination. Early observers of hot air balloons were not sure exactly what they were for, but ballooning’s capacity for setting…

The folklore gathered at the Irish Schools’ Collection contains many tall tales, strange happenings and stories of the supernatural spanning the length and breadth of Ireland. The example below, reported by Lill Dempsey of Ballyboher, County…

The Tuskar Rock Lighthouse stands on a rocky islet 11.3km or 7 miles off the south east corner of the island of Ireland. The lighthouse was constructed to warn ships of what has long been a graveyard of sailors, part of a band of treacherous waters…

‘What dreadful weather!’ Dorothy Wordsworth exclaimed on 28 August 1829. She had ‘a hundred fears’ because her brother William was going to cross the Irish Sea from Holyhead the following night.As they would soon find out, ‘three vessels had been…

Port health has been an important aspect of public health since at least the middle ages. The practise of quarantine began in the early modern period, and focused in particular on ensuring isolation for a period of forty days during outbreaks of…

In August 1909, the port of Fishguard in Pembrokeshire hit the headlines. The Cunard Steamship Company had chosen Fishguard as its first port-of-call for its Atlantic liners. In its inaugural crossing from New York to Fishguard, the Cunard ship…

When James Joyce left Ireland for exile in continental Europe, he passed through Holyhead, taking the train from there to Euston. The poem W.B. Yeats, already a great success in London, had heard from his friend Lady Gregory about the talented and…

In September of 1727, Jonathan Swift embarked on a return trip to Ireland from London. Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, Swift was riding high on the success of his recently published Gulliver’s Travels. He was also though anxious for news…

When Mary Wollstonecraft crossed from Holyhead to Dublin – ‘the best and shortest passage’, she noted – in October 1786, she was lucky. ‘[T]he weather was fine the prospects delightful’, she wrote in a letter to Eliza Bishop, looking back on the…