Dunmore East Harbour, Dunmore East, Co. Waterford

The fluted granite shaft tapers upward in three stages to a lantern capped with an ogee dome, its curve swelling and narrowing like an onion before it settles to a point, finished off with an iron weathervane. It is an odd and rather grand piece of civic sculpture to find doing the workaday job of warning vessels off rocks.

The lighthouse was built in 1824 to a design prepared by the engineer Alexander Nimmo, who was responsible for a good deal of harbour and road infrastructure along Ireland's southern and western coasts in the early nineteenth century. Nimmo had a habit of dressing utilitarian structures in classical clothing, and here the conceit is carried through with real conviction: fluted granite ashlar walls, a moulded cornice, wrought iron lattice railings, all applied to a working navigational aid on a polygonal plan. Around 1875, a four-bay single-storey store was added to the north side, its coursed cut-stone walls and flat roof flanking the lighthouse in a more modest register, though it is now boarded up and no longer in use. What makes the lighthouse more than an exercise in style is what survives inside it. A range of original mechanisms remains intact, giving the structure a technical as well as an aesthetic interest, a rare case of an early nineteenth-century lighthouse retaining both its architectural set-piece exterior and the workings that made it function.

The building's condition is unusually good for its age, with the salient features and materials that mark it out as an early example still in place rather than replaced or smoothed over by later repairs. Visitors approaching along the harbour pier get the full effect of the composition from below, the tapered fluted shaft drawing the eye up past the square-headed window openings, which were built without sills, to the lantern and its distinctive domed capping. It rewards a slow look rather than a passing glance, since much of its interest lies in the quality of the stone masonry and the survival of small original details that are easy to miss at speed.