272 



IRELAND. 



Suiiule*. beinif 20 miles lonff, and nearly two deep, with prowl 

 ^T ' anchorage and deep water, so that a large fleet might 

 lie there with ease and safety. As, however, there is 

 scarcely even a village on its shores, it is little trequent- 



Ixnigh 

 Foylc. 



Ulster ; but they are by no means confined to this coast, Statistics, 

 being strikingly observable, even on the east coast. ^|T" Y " < T 

 At the entrance of the river Bannow, in the celebrated the "i S n (is 

 barony of Forth, in the county of Wexford, vestiges of onthecoas 

 ruins, traced with difficulty amids the heaps of barren- 



Fovle is an immense oval basin, 18 miles long and tatiyes to ITOment ; ana so late as the year 

 Iht broad Between Magilions and Green Castle, registered in the custom-house books of Wexford as 



where it opens into the ocean; it is not above a mile having four streets winch paid quitrent to the crown, 

 a half wide with eight and ten fathoms depth of The only remains visible in 1786 were the walls of the 



water Before this entrance, there is a large sand cal- church ; there is not, on or near the site of the town, 



but one poor solitary hut, Amid the sands between 

 Portrush and Dunluce in the county of Antrim, in the 

 year 1 783, the ruins of a village might be seen desert- 

 ed by its inhabitants. In the year 1787, the peninsula 

 of Hornhead, in the county of Donegal, contained ves- 

 tiges of enclosures, so small and so numerous as to mark 

 the residence of a considerable number of families : but 



then it was quite a desert. Rather more than a centu- 

 ry ago, the peninsula of Rossgull, which lies between 



Geographi- 

 cal posi- 

 tions. 



led the Tunns, on which the sea sometimes beats with 

 a prodigious noise and violence ; the channel between 

 this sand and the main Is broad, .and at all times 14 or 

 15 fathoms depth of water. , On the east side of the 

 lough there are also shoals, or banks of sand, and some 

 smaller ones on the west j but the two channels be- 

 tween them are wideband generally four fathoms deep; at 

 the entrance of the river, the water is 10 or 12 fathoms; 

 so that, upon the whole, Lough Foyle is a very safe, 



capacious, and commodious haven, for the largest fleets, the harbours of Sheephaven and Mulroy in the county 

 We shall subjoin to this description of the coasts of of Donegal, was selected as the residence of one of the 

 Ireland the following Table of the principal geo- noble families of Hamilton ; at present the gardens are 



totally stript of trees and shrubbery by the fury of the 

 Longitude. western winds ; the limits of the courts, the flights of 



9 32' steps, and the terraces, can scarcely be traced amidst 



9 11 the heaps of sand which overwhelm them. The man- 

 1024 sion itself was, when described by Dr. Hamilton, fast 



10 54 approaching to destruction, the lower apartments being 

 10 59 already filled with sand, which was beginning to rise 

 10 28 above the thresholds ; it is said that 1200 acres of land 

 10 36 were also buried, in a short time, in irrecoverable ruin. 

 10 4 Dr. Hamilton mentions two other striking instances of 

 9 37 the encroachment of the sand on the coast of Donegal ; 



29 one of a house, which had not been long built when he 



28 saw itj the roof of which was just emerging from the 



sand ; the owner told him that the house had at first a 

 considerable tract of pasture ground between it and the 

 sea shore, but that latterly he was obliged every year 

 to dig it out of the encroaching sands. Thirty or forty 

 years before Dr. Hamilton wrote, there was a forge in 

 a village of Favet on the northern coast of Donegal, 

 but then there were no vestiges of it, except some stones 

 in the midst of loose and shifting sands. 



Dr. Hamilton is of opinion, that the Atlantic storms 

 on the west coast of Ireland are of more frequent oc- 

 currence, and superior potency, to what they formerly 

 were. " Every person on our coasts," (he observes) 

 " whose situation has made the construction or preserva- 

 tion of embankments against the influxes of the ocean 

 necessary, knows, by painful experience, how much his 



graphical positions on them. 



Place. Latitude. 



Clare 52 51' 



Limeric 52 42 



Louphead, Shannon . 52 37 

 Dunmore Head ... 52 

 Skellig rocks . . . 51 

 Codshead.Kenmare river 51 

 Dursey Island ... 51 

 Bantry Bay, Sheep head 5 1 

 Cape Clear .... 

 Kinsale light . . . 



Cork 



Youghall .... 

 Waterford .... 

 Carnsore Point . . . 



51 

 51 

 51 

 51 



52 

 52 



13 



52 

 43 

 37 

 34 

 22 

 35 

 54 

 43 

 13 



35 

 12 



28 



8 

 8 

 7 

 7 

 6 

 6 

 6 

 6 

 6 

 5 

 6 

 9 



48 

 10 

 18 



19 



1 



16 



12 



57 



1 



13 



10 18 

 8 41 

 10 

 33 

 25 



11 



Wexford 52 22 



Wicklow light ... 52 59 



Dublin 53 21 



Drogheda .... 53 44 



Belfast 54 



Torhead 55 



Galway 53 



Broadhaven .... 54 28 



Sligo 54 22 



Donegal 54 41 



Entrance to Lough Swilly 55 17 



Mullinhead . . . . 55 24 



Londonderry ... 55 7 15 



effects of such an immense volume of waters as 

 the Atlantic Ocean, acted on, as they often are, by vio- 

 on thecoasu lent westerly winds, upon the west coast of Ireland, in 

 rendering it more angled and indented than any of its 

 other coasts, have already been noticed. But it may 

 be proper also to notice in this place, other effects of 

 the winds on the coasts of Ireland ; we allude to the 

 immense accumulation of sand, which they have forced 

 up, by which, in many places, the land, and even vil- 

 lages, have been overwhelmed. The following in- 

 etances in point, are drawn from a memoir on the cli- 

 mate of Ireland, by the Rev. William Hamilton, pub- 

 lished in the Gth volume of the Irish Transactions. 



8 



7 

 7 

 7 



Effects of 

 the winds 



labours have of late years increased, and how impotent 

 works, formerly effectual, are now found to be -in repel- 

 ling the increasing tides of the present day ;- public 

 roads encroached on, walls beaten down, strands less 

 passable than heretofore, meadow and tillage land of- 

 tener and more deeply inundated ; all concur to prove 

 encreasing tides and frequency of storms on our coast." 



A short description of the Nymph bank seems pro- Sea bank 

 perly to belong to the hydrography of Ireland, and may 

 therefore be inserted in this place. It lies in St. 

 George's Channel, about 10 leagues off the coast of 

 Waterford in Munster. Its distance from the high land 

 of Dungarvon is about 11 leagues S. S.E. The appel- 

 lation Nymph Bank strictly applies to that part of this 



The effects of the winds," he observes, " are parti- sand bank which lies opposite Waterford ; the extreme 

 cularly distinguishabk in the northern province of point of it is nearly 20 leagues from the land ; the 



