Irish Coast Guard Station Locations
In researching the Coast Guard Service, of William Jenkins, my Great Great Grandfather, I was often frustrated by not knowing where the posting was to. My lack of knowledge of Irish Geography meant that every posting was difficult to place. With help from a number of people, I was pointed to the Ordnance Survey of Ireland’s website where they have overlaid old maps onto the current mapping.
The table below provides the link to all the Coast Guard Stations in Ireland I can find, on the most appropriate map. The 25” maps sometimes have details that the 6” does not and vice versa. Where the feature exists on both maps, the 25” map is used. However, the wonderful OSI website allows you to click on any version of their online mapping so you can see the same point on several maps, including present day and aerial photography.
The OSI URL includes two six digit numbers which have been converted using a tool downloaded from the website to convert to Northing and Easting. These could be a few metres out physically on the ground if you enter them into a GPS device but should get you very close to the feature.
A feature of the 6” maps is that you can zoom out and find out the parish name. This was another frustration in looking for pre-1864 church records. There are records available, but you need to know the parish and a Coast Guard Station name didn’t help. The information below and the 6” map should help to make the connections.
The information is reasonably good for the Republic of Ireland as they have overlaid the old maps. However, the north does not have the same coverage of old maps and thus the detail is less good.
Where I have come across a place where there was a Coast Guard Station but I can’t find the buildings, I have placed a marker to the place and consequently there is no Northing and Easting. I used my own customised coding to order the points around the coast of Ireland. Starting in Dublin Harbour and heading south, all the points should follow the coast clockwise as if you were walking on a path with the sea to your left. My virtual tour of Ireland took many hours but was made possible by the good people at OSI releasing this historic resource free to use. The last few points come from the north and end just to the north of Dublin. This mirrors the way in which Coast Guard Records were organised in the 19th Century and many of the ADM book pages will follow the geographical order in the table below.
A separate piece of work is to collate information on when the Coast Guard Stations were established and “abandoned”. This information can be gleaned from the ADM books and is work in progress for me.
I did start putting this data onto Google Maps in the hope that I could use it to point people to the CoastguardsofYesteryear website from there but it all needed entering manually. I was able to create a spreadsheet in Googledocs which could be viewed in Googlemaps but the link was via the spreadsheet and so it wouldn’t be seen by people just browsing the map. So if anyone knows how to automatically upload these data onto GoogleMaps, I’d be glad to hear from you.
Tim Knight June 2011
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Posted by bodad
on June 17 2011
