Page 142 - Greystones Archaeological Historical Society

CÚL OF THE ROCK

that A. Atkinson referred to in 1815 as a ‘half-formed harbour.
This was the wave-scoured deeper channel edging the lee of the
Gray Stones that became the kernel from which the town fanned
out and grew. This was the place, also, of which a Fisheries
Inspector named Mr J. Irvine, echoing the experience of local
fishermen, reported in the 1820s:

‘Every heavy gale from the northward fills up this harbour and
the next year’s southerly one opens it up again …’

and then continued his recommendation in support of what the
local fishermen wanted:

‘The opinion therefore of the fishermen also is that if a mere
breakwater of loose stones was run out from the beach
towards the eastward with a return to the southward it would
not only protect them from the northerly gales which are most
prevalent and dangerous but would also prevent the partial
choking of the harbour which then takes place.’

And then, a ‘wheen of waiting’.

Within five years of it being photographed so
comprehensively by Robert French some sixty years after that
report, the Cúl of the Rock was already silted over due to the
construction of the pier in the mid eighteen eighties, and was
gone within the next decade as a consequence of the
inadequacy of the north groyne completed in 1888/89.

It was at this very spot, where once a half-transomed boat
with four rowing thwarts was sculled to shore by a lone figure
standing in the well of the boat, having tended to the mooring
lines of a top sail schooner moored at the face of the jetty, that
my brother Billy and I daily baited our lines in 1951, the year I
first fished the longline; when I was fourteen, and he was

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