The Dún Laoghaire East Pier battery opens to the public tomorrow. FRANCES O'ROURKEgets a sneak preview
NOBODY has ever tried to assault the battery at the end of Dún Laoghaire’s East Pier. That’s the fortress with a lighthouse at its centre at the end of the almost-2km-long walk to the mouth of Dún Laoghaire Harbour, familiar to those of us who ritually touch its thick granite walls to mark the halfway point of our trek.
The most walkers ever get to see is a glimpse of an inner courtyard, when its heavy blue doors swing open to let a harbour vehicle in. But from tomorrow, Dún Laoghaire Harbour will open it to the public for the first time since it was built in 1859.
Built to defend the British Empire in the days when Dún Laoghaire was Kingstown, it’s one of only two batteries (a tower with emplacements for guns) in Ireland – the other is in Cork. However, it never saw enemy action.
Curious walkers, military buffs and small boys will love the battery, which the harbour company has begun to restore. The deep entrance opens into that courtyard, with a whitewashed cook-house and officers quarters on the left, and lodgings for 24 soldiers. Both look like large country cottages, strangely domestic in this setting.
The lighthouse rises up from a thick circular granite base, where a lighthouse keeper and his family lived until to the middle of the 20th century, and drawings show a parlour, bedrooms, and cosy living quarters.
The cannons at this level are gone, but Dún Laoghaire Harbour’s port operations manager, Simon Coate, points to the sweeping tracks on which the guns swivelled. There’s an artillery store, a magazine, the place where a furnace would have heated shot for the guns, and the huge bell once rung to warn ships in fog – it was replaced in the 1940s by a diaphone. At the top level (which won’t be open to the public) are the guns used for salutes.
Visitors will have to use their imaginations to recreate life in the battery, although posters are being hung around it as a guide. Hung, not fixed says Simon – they tried to drill into the granite but made no impression.
Starting tomorrow, the East Pier Battery will be open from Thursdays to Sundays, 10.30am to 5pm, admission free. www.dlharbour.ie/content/ history/ harbour/ east_pier_battery. php
