Loop Head Lighthouse
— — a steady light at the end of the land.
Not only on a wall.
“Loop Head sits at the western tip of County Clare, where the Shannon Estuary opens into the Atlantic. A light has burned here since 1670, first as coal in a stone-vaulted cottage, now as a white tower built in 1854. From the cliffs at its base it is more than eighty metres down to the water. The keeper's house, vacant since the light was automated in 1991, is now a place you can rent for a night. The wind is the part nobody warns you about.
Loop 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.
Loop Head Lighthouse stands at the western tip of the Loop Head Peninsula, County Clare, on Ireland's mid-west coast. The lighthouse sits on cliffs about 84 metres above the Atlantic, marking the northern boundary of the Shannon Estuary as it meets the sea. The peninsula reaches roughly eighteen kilometres into the Atlantic from Kilrush, the small market town on the lower Shannon. The Cliffs of Moher lie about thirty kilometres north along the R478, and Kilkee, the nearest village of any size, is about twenty-five kilometres east on the R487. The site has held a navigational light since 1670 and is maintained today by the Commissioners of Irish Lights.
The current tower was completed in 1854 by the Commissioners of Irish Lights, the fourth structure to carry the light on this site. The first, built in 1670, was a stone-vaulted cottage with a coal-fired brazier burning on its roof, one of four such cottages raised around the Irish coast that year. The 1854 tower is a plain whitewashed cylinder twenty-three metres tall, with a black lantern at the top showing a single white flash every four seconds, visible for about twenty-three nautical miles. The light was electrified in 1971 and automated on 16 January 1991. The last keeper turned the key and went home.
The lighthouse is open to visitors from late March through early November, with tower tours run by Clare County Council under licence from the Commissioners of Irish Lights. The two former keepers' cottages have been let as self-catering accommodation since 2010 by the Irish Landmark Trust and book out months ahead for summer. The drive from Kilkee takes about thirty minutes on the R487. Loop Head was named Best Place to Holiday in Ireland by The Irish Times in 2013 and remains far quieter than the Cliffs of Moher to the north. The cliff walk south is exposed and not for windy days.