Coast Guard Station (possible), Cahore, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Signal & Watch

Coast Guard Station (possible), Cahore, Co. Wexford

At Cahore Point on the Wexford coast, a field of rough pastureland beside a holiday park marks the approximate location of something that no longer exists and whose exact position was already uncertain by the time anyone thought to record it carefully.

A signal station was almost certainly here by October 1804, its mast raised to scan the Irish Sea for French warships. By the time the Ordnance Survey mapped the area in 1839 to 1840, the original structure had vanished from the record entirely, most likely absorbed into a coastguard station that itself has since been demolished. What remains is an absence with several layers.

The station at Cahore Point was one link in a chain of more than eighty signal stations built by the British Board of Ordnance along the Irish coast during the first decade of the nineteenth century. The system ran continuously from Malin Head in Donegal down to Dublin Bay, each post within visual range of the next, with naval signal apparatus allowing messages to pass rapidly along the coast. The purpose was straightforward: to give early warning of a French invasion fleet. The nearest neighbours in the chain were at Blackwater Head, about 16.7 kilometres to the south-southwest, a site now entirely lost to coastal erosion, and at Kilmichael Point, roughly 19.8 kilometres to the north-northeast, where a fragment of the structure may still survive as a ruin. When the threat of French invasion faded in the mid-1810s, the network was abandoned. At Cahore, the Ordnance Survey's second edition map, surveyed between 1885 and 1887, shows a new signal station appearing some 70 metres southwest of where the earlier coastguard station had stood, a rectangular building roughly 17 metres east to west and 9 metres north to south, with two smaller outbuildings and a flagstaff nearby. By the third edition, surveyed between 1902 and 1905, the earlier of these buildings was already recorded as roofless.

The site sits on level ground about 85 metres from the coast, with open views in all directions, which explains why it was chosen in the first place. The surrounding landscape is a mixture of rough pasture and a modern holiday park to the west and northwest, with a long sandy beach beginning about 250 metres to the south. For anyone who knows to look, the general area is also within a few kilometres of a motte and bailey at Glascarrig North and a possible tower house site at Peppardstown, making Cahore Point an unexpectedly layered corner of the county, even if the thing that originally drew attention to it has left almost no trace above ground.

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Pete F
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