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Displaying items by tag: Exhibition in Cobh

#Exhibition - The Commissioners of Irish Lights have joined the Royal Irish Academy to bring an exhibition that captures the history of Irish Lights, the history of the island of Ireland itself, its ever-changing coasts and shorelines, and the history of the people who lived along our island’s seaboard.

What emerges is a never-before told story of devotion to duty, scientific, engineering and physical endeavour, world war, revolution and change. It is also a deeply personal story of those who worked with and built up Irish Lights and who devoted their lives to protecting the coastline for the safety of all.

Through the nineteenth century the number of Ireland’s lighthouses increased from fourteen to seventy-four, with eleven lightships placed around the east and south coasts.

The exhibition explores how Irish Lights, with its origins in the late-eighteenth century, and coming of age in the certainties of the nineteenth, faced the challenges of global and national uncertainty in the early twentieth century. Precisely, the exhibition details Irish Lights’ history between 1911 and 1923.

This exhibition explores these years, and incredible events, such as; the Easter Rising of 1916, the Anglo-Irish War of 1919–1921, and the Anglo-Irish Treaty.

The exhibition will be showcasing in venues all along the Irish coastline in 2016.

Currently the exhibition is been held at Cobh Library on Casement Square until Saturday 15th October

Opening Times:Tuesday to Saturday - 9.30am - 5.30pm

Closed on Mondays and Saturdays 

 

 

Published in Lighthouses

About Commander Bill King, Solo Circumnavigator

William Donald Aelian King was the last surviving submarine commander in the Second World War - in charge of the British Navy's T-class Telemachus that sank a Japanese sub in the Strait of Malacca, between Malaysia and Sumatra, in 1944.

Decorated many times for his service by the end of the war, King became a trailblazing solo sailor.

At the age of 58, he was the oldest participant in The Sunday Times Golden Globe Race sailing Galway Blazer II, a junk-rigged schooner he designed himself.

After a number of abortive attempts, including an incident with "a large sea creature", he finally completed his solo circumnavigation of the globe in 1973.

Beyond his aquatic escapades, King settled with his wife Anita (who died in 1984, aged 70) at Oranmore Castle outside Galway after the war, where he later developed a pioneering organic farm and garden to help tackle his wife's asthma.

The round-the-world sailor and Galway native Bill King died on Friday, 21 September, 2012, aged 102.