Light 01 of Four · Munster
Fastnet Rock
Ireland's Teardrop — the last of home for a century of emigrants.
- Distance
- ≈ 20 km 10 km+ · accredited
- The light
- Fastnet Rock fixed point · start or finish
- Mainland
- Co. Cork either direction, land anywhere
- Water
- The Celtic Sea Munster
The story
Ireland's Teardrop — the last of home for a century of emigrants.
Current tower completed 1904 in Cornish granite.
The Irish knew the rock as Carraig Aonair — the lonely rock — long before the lighthouse. To the emigrants who sailed from Cobh and Baltimore through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was something else again: the Fastnet was the last of Ireland they would ever see, dropping astern into the Atlantic as the ships turned for America. They called it Ireland's Teardrop.
The first tower, cast iron and raised in 1854, was never a match for the open Atlantic. Storms drove spray clean over its lantern and cracked its fabric until it had to be abandoned. Its replacement — the tower that stands today — was built between 1896 and 1904 from dovetailed blocks of Cornish granite, each stone cut and trial-fitted on the mainland before being shipped out and set in place. It remains one of the great feats of rock-lighthouse engineering, and the tallest lighthouse in Ireland.
To swim the Fastnet is to reckon with that last look — to hold the teardrop at one end of the line and the Cork coast at the other.
The crossing
Between Fastnet Rock and the Co. Cork mainland.
The crossing links the rock with the Co. Cork mainland, most often to or from the harbour at Baltimore, threading the approaches to Roaringwater Bay and its scatter of islands. It may be swum in either direction and may finish anywhere along the coast; the rock is the only fixed point, and the line and the landfall are the swimmer's own.
This is exposed Atlantic water. Swell arrives unbroken from the open ocean, and the tide sets hard around the rock itself, so the leg nearest the light is committed and honest. Inside the islands the water quiets, but the Fastnet's weather can change the whole character of the swim within an hour. It rewards patience and a good pilot over speed.
