Seagull Memories

I love being near the sea and have done since I was a little girl. Growing up I had an acute awareness of the nearness of the sea, the shore at Seapoint (Monkstown) being about a kilometre from our house.

In the summers of my childhood the sun shone a lot (in my memory anyway), we rarely got sunburnt and the world was a safe place. From about the age of 8 or 9, along with friends, I would spend day after day of the sunny summer holidays at Seapoint. I learnt to swim there, just beyond the rocks in front of the Martello Tower, which in the summer housed a shop. On hot days, we would enter its damp, dark and chill interior to buy a slice of ice cream in a wafer. Oh, what bliss it was to walk home, hair wet and sticky from the salt water, legs tingling from the sun and a Neapolitan ice cream dripping in pink and green rivulets down my fingers.

As autumn came, the routine of school enforced order back into my world. The days grew shorter and the importance of Seapoint in my life receded. But as the weather became colder and the evenings darker, the sea spoke to me again. I would lie in bed on stormy winter nights and listen to the mournful and lonely sound of the foghorns. The loudest sound was that from the end of Dun Laoghaire Pier but I would usually pick up the fainter sounds from The Baily in Howth or even the Kish lighthouse.

I would imagine what kind of ships might be taking shelter from the weather in Dublin Bay. Who were on these ships? How did it feel being buffeted around by the waves and the wind? I imagined such vessels becoming illuminated briefly every few minutes by the lighthouse beacon sweeping across the bay, as the foghorn issued its mournful warning.

As I lay in bed imagining and listening, my mind would wander to the dark and overgrown graveyard on Carrickbrennan Road in Monkstown which contains the graves of many of the men and women who drowned in some of the numerous sea tragedies that occurred in the 1800s in Dublin Bay.

In particular I would think of the story of the two ships, The Rochdale and The Prince of Wales, both troopships carrying soldiers and their families including children to Liverpool. Both vessels got into trouble shortly after leaving Dublin Port in November 1807 in a fierce snowstorm. The Prince of Wales was wrecked on the rocks at Blackrock with only a few survivors who escaped in a small boat. The fate of The Rochdale was equally tragic with the ship observed in difficulty off the coast by onlookers on shore. The weather was so atrocious that they could do little to assist. The ship was wrecked on the rocks by the Martello Tower in Seapoint. There were no survivors and nearly 400 lives were lost on that bitter night.

The tragedy was that, had they known how close to the shore they actually were, many might have made it to safety. Instead, the coastline at Blackrock and Seapoint was strewn with mutilated bodies from both wrecks the following morning. Many of the victims were buried, probably in a mass grave, in the old graveyard in Monkstown.

The echoes of these tragedies was carried by the doleful sound of the foghorn as I lay in my bed, secure in the knowledge that, unlike the unfortunate sailors and their families, I was safe and secure.

Now I live a few kilometres inland from where I grew up and I still miss the sound of the foghorn. On days like these when I am sitting in my suburban garden in the sun, listening to the birdsong, the sound of passing aircraft and the hum of a neighbour’s lawnmower, when a seagull cries from the field beyond the hedge. His call brings with it the smell of salt water, the taste of Neapolitan ice cream and a tumble of childhood summer memories. And I smile and I dream. As I close my eyes, I can still hear the lonely ominous call of the foghorn. And I shiver as a breeze cools my skin and I think once more of these unfortunates who lost their lives in the place where I learned to swim.