In years gone by in Ireland, there had to be taxes paid on certain goods as tobacco and wine coming from foreign lands to Ireland. But the people who were poor at the time they could not afford to be paying tax on these goods. They often decided to…

The Dublin Dockers started by collecting old photographs and are delighted to report that our collection has broken through the 4,000 mark. In addition, people have donated over 6,000 documents which we have passed on to Dublin City Council. Most of…

In Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel Sylvia’s Lovers (1863), the provincial whaling town of Monkshaven (based on Whitby in the north of England) is thrown into a state of excitement by the return of a Greenland ship, and a crowd immediately gathers around…

There are around 29 martello towers dotted around the bay; coastal, circular buildings with curved, nearly-windowless walls. Some have been taken up as unique seaside homes or museums, but many are unused and inaccessible. Most were built in…

At 5 o’clock on the morning of 31 January 2020, a handful of reporters and press photographers huddled in the pre-dawn rain at Dublin Port, where a group of senior Fine Gael politicians had donned yellow high-viz vests for a photo op. Then Tánaiste…

From the eighteenth century on, ship captains were able to rely on precise timepieces, known as chronometers, to tell the time accurately, no matter where they were in the world. Still, it was good practice to double check these nautical instruments…

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…

‘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…

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…