Tag Archives: dry dock

Royal Canal dry dock

Aidan Herdman has left a comment on my page about the Broadstone Line of the Grand Canal and has included in it a link to a photograph of Phibsborough cubs/scouts standing at the Royal Canal dry dock. I can’t recall ever seeing such a photo before. It’s an impressive structure and I’m grateful to Aidan for the link.

WI and NAMA

From WI's annual report for 2011

From WI’s annual report for 2011

Athy dry dock

I have been sent some photos of Athy dry dock and have added them to this page under the heading Grand Canal Barrow Line.

Mullingar dry dock(s)

The Ordnance Survey map of around 1840 shows a dry dock at Mullingar:

Mullingar dry dock ~1840

So does the map of around 1900:

Mullingar dry dock ~1900

The photo below was taken into the sun, alas. The entrance to the dry dock is towards the top of the entrance. So why are there curved stones closer to the camera? Was there once a second dry dock? Or was a second dock planned without ever beinf constructed? Or was the dock moved from one site to the other?

Entrances?

 

The Ruth Delany and Peter Clarke histories say nothing about this. If you can shed light on the matter, please leave a Comment below.

Nineteenth-century Irish canal boats

Illustrations of early Irish inland waterways vessels are relatively scarce. The drawing below shows the sterns of two of them.

Portobello Harbour 1882

This is from The Graphic of May 13, 1882, and shows the lighting of tar-barrels in Portobello Harbour, on the Grand Canal in Dublin, to celebrate the release from prison of Charles Stewart Parnell and two colleagues.

The layout of the harbour in around 1900 can be seen on the OSI Historic 25″ map. Where were the vessels tied? What are the buildings in the background? What can be said about the vessels? Presumably wooden horse-drawn barges, but they look rather narrow to me. Comments welcome.

The harbour itself is, alas, no more.

 

 

 

Update: New Ross dry dock

Eamonn Coady has kindly sent on some pics of New Ross dry dock, which I’ve added to the Dry docks page.

Lots more stuff in the wings: getting time to sort it all out is the problem.

 

Shannon Harbour dry docks

My dry docks overview page had a bad link in it, which was my fault, but I hope that’s now fixed as the Shannon Harbour dry docks

34B in the dock

page is now up. Comments, corrections and suggestions for improvements and additions will be welcome.

Dry docks

I’m starting a new section on Irish inland waterways dry docks. The thing is, I have photos of very few of them, and even my list of docks is almost certainly incomplete. So this page has photos of a few of the docks, but I’m hoping readers will be able to help with lots more.