Broadhaven Lighthouse, Ballyglass, Co. Mayo

Work began in 1846, stopped, and did not resume in earnest until the structure was finally completed between 1853 and 1855, a gap of years that speaks to the difficulty of raising a tower of cut granite and rendered masonry on an exposed headland in north Mayo. The finished tower tapers gently from base to lantern, a silhouette that gives it a slightly softened, almost organic profile rather than the rigid cylinder one might expect, and around the lantern itself runs a band of curvilinear ironwork, delicate scrollwork set against the plainness of the render below.

The design belongs to George Halpin Senior, who served as Inspector of Works and Lighthouses for the Ballast Board, the body responsible for navigation and harbour works around Ireland's coast, from 1810 until his death in 1854. Halpin was responsible for a long chain of Irish lighthouses in the first half of the nineteenth century, and this one shares a family resemblance with his tower at Rathlin O'Birne in County Donegal, built in the following decade; both display the same tapering form and the same treatment of the lantern gallery. The tower here was commissioned for service in 1855, not long after Halpin's death, making it one of the closing works of his long career. It was later "improved" in 1930 and electrified in 1977, the kind of incremental modernisation typical of Irish lighthouses as they moved from oil and clockwork mechanisms toward automated electric light over the course of the twentieth century.

Structurally, the tower rises in three stages on a circular plan, its battered walls, meaning they slope slightly inward as they rise for added stability against wind, sitting on a chamfered plinth of granite ashlar. A cantilevered walkway encircles the lantern, carried on granite corbels carved with a rounded thumbnail moulding and supporting the cast-iron railings known by the manufacturer's pattern name "Serpentine". The door and window openings keep their original proportions, the windows fitted with eight-over-eight timber sash frames and cut-granite sills. Around the base, the grounds are still marked by their original limewashed perimeter piers, their stepped capping now softened by a covering of lichen, with wrought-iron double gates still hung between them.