Hook Head Lighthouse
— eight centuries of the same patient light.
Not only on a wall.
“The southeasternmost point of Ireland, where the Celtic Sea meets the mouth of Waterford Harbour. The tower has stood since the early 1200s, when William Marshal raised a stone keep above the spot where monks had kept a warning fire burning for centuries before. Automated since 1996, the light still turns. The limestone the tower is built from is older still: fossils of sea creatures are pressed into the rock at the base, and the cliffs around it are studied by geologists. One of the oldest operational lighthouses in the world.
Hook Head Lighthouse, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
Hook Head sits at the tip of the Hook Peninsula in County Wexford, in the southeast of Ireland, where the entrance to Waterford Harbour opens to the Celtic Sea. The headland is the southeast extremity of County Wexford and a designated Special Area of Conservation. The lighthouse tower is roughly 35 metres tall and visible for some 23 nautical miles offshore. The peninsula itself sits on a recognised geological heritage site; the limestone bedrock holds Carboniferous-period marine fossils that are visible at the cliff base around the tower. The site is reached by a 50-kilometre drive from Wexford town, or by ferry from Passage East on the Waterford side of the estuary.
The current tower was raised in the early 13th century by William Marshal, 1st Earl of Pembroke, the Anglo-Norman knight who held Leinster through marriage to Isabel de Clare. It replaced an older monastic warning fire kept by the followers of Saint Dubhán, the 5th-century Welsh monk who established a settlement on the peninsula. Marshal's tower is built of local Carboniferous limestone, with walls four metres thick at the base, and rises in three vaulted stone chambers connected by a spiral stair of 115 steps. The black and white bands painted on the tower today are a 19th-century daymark scheme, distinguishing Hook Head from the lighthouses at Tuskar Rock and the Saltees further up the coast.
The lighthouse complex has been a working visitor centre since 2001, run by the local community trust Hook Heritage Ltd. Guided tours climb the 115 steps to the lantern room and the external balcony at the top, where the light is still in operation under the management of the Commissioners of Irish Lights; it was automated and the last keeper withdrawn in 1996. The site is open all year with reduced winter hours, and the small café and craft shop at the base look out across the rocks where the Atlantic swell breaks against the cliff. The drive from Dublin runs about three hours; from Cork, two and a half.