Balbriggan Harbour, Balbriggan, Co. Dublin

At Balbriggan, the tapered limestone tower rises from a circular base, its walls painted ashlar finished with corbelled brackets that carry a flat roof and a cast-iron railed walkway right around the lantern. The windows lower down are square headed with stone cills, but they have been blocked up, leaving the tongue and groove timber doors, one at the base of the steps and one high on the tower wall, as the only real points of access. The whole structure adjoins a single storey building that acts as its approach, with rubble stone walls flanking the way in.

The tower carries a date of 1761 and a dedication naming George Hamilton of Hampton, County Dublin, described on a plaque as Third Baron of His Majesty's Court of the Exchequer in Ireland, whose stated ambition was to promote the trade and prosperity of the area by building the pier on which the light stands. That kind of private investment in harbour infrastructure was common enough in eighteenth century Ireland, when local landowners often funded piers and quays to support fishing and trade in their own townlands. A second plaque, added much later, commemorates a very different moment in the harbour's history: Patrick Joseph Hanley, a Balbriggan man aged twenty nine, who on the night of 24 August 1957 went out alone in a currach, a light traditional boat, during a violent storm to try to save two friends he believed were in danger at sea. He did not return. The plaque, raised by the people of the town, quotes the line from John's Gospel about laying down one's life for one's friends, and it stands as the harbour's second, quieter monument alongside Hamilton's.

Together the two inscriptions turn the lighthouse into something more layered than a simple navigational aid. One marks the improving ambitions of an eighteenth century patron, the other an act of ordinary courage two centuries later, and both are fixed to the same small tower at the harbour's edge, within a few feet of each other, so that reading one means reading the other.