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…

After the introduction of the uniform penny post in the United Kingdom in 1840, postal volumes grew rapidly and were an increasingly important part of goods traffic between Great Britain and Ireland. In 1849, the Post Office invited tenders for a…

The London North Western Railway Company (LNWR) maintained their Holyhead to Dublin express service by switching the two Greenore ships to the Dublin service. An older ship was on standby. The potential of U-boats to destroy shipping had hardly been…

For the community of Kingstown (now Dún Laoghaire), 10 October 1918 began like any day in a busy port town. The first locals knew of the incident was the sound of the torpedoes. The Royal Mail Ship (and passenger ferry) Leinster was on its regular…

By October 1918, it had become apparent that the First World War was slowly drawing to a close. It was not yet foreseeable whether it would be over by Christmas, a hope annually revived since 1914, but an end to the fighting lay in the near future.…

Dublin port during the early twentieth century was a place of great business trade and work. Having been refurbished in the 1800s to give way for more shipping of trades and goods, the port had become a huge employment area for most of Dublin.…

Along the river Barrow, nestled upon a Caledonian batholith, on the Kilkenny side of the bank, lies a little town named Graiguenamanagh. It is in this village that our story begins, with a man called Gorman who was busy cutting Granite on the Quay 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…

Prime Minister David Lloyd George was aware that Britain’s manpower resources were dwindling. He had prioritised shipbuilding, tanks and aircraft production before army demands. The army wanted 1.25 million new entrants. Lloyd George was only…

Mary Delany (1700-1788) was no stranger to crossing the Irish Sea. She had made one trip to Ireland as a young widow in 1731 and, when she later lived in Ireland between 1744 and 1767, she made regular visits back to England. Delany generally made…

'Pembroke Dock' is an abbreviation of 'Pembroke Dockyard', the new name given to the location in 1817. The Royal Navy had built the dockyard and adjacent town three years earlier in 1814, initially calling it 'Pater Yard'. The sole purpose of the…

‘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…

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…

In August 1909 the liner the Mauretania called for the first time at Fishguard, having established a new record for the fastest crossing of the Atlantic from New York. A public holiday was proclaimed, and trains of day trippers from Swansea, Llanelli…

In 1909, Fishguard became a port of call for the Lusitania on eastbound transatlantic crossings between Liverpool and New York. Not only had Fishguard brought the United Kingdom and the United States closer together, but it also demonstrated the…

Seventy years ago, a young woman from Lismore County Waterford set out with her bicycle on her first trip out of Ireland alone. The trip would take her to England, a ‘Pagan land’ something that did not go unnoticed by her neighbours some of whom were…

The inhabitants of Abercastle, Pembrokeshire were much surprised on Saturday [10th August 1876] by the arrival on their coast of a seaman named Alfred Johnson in an open boat in which he left Gloucester Massachusetts on the 15th June. The boat is…

In our world of instant communications it’s hard to imagine that it once took ten days to send a message from North America to Europe. That was the fastest a ship could go - if the weather was favourable. All this changed in 1858 when the first…