Imagine waking up to a shower of spray crashing on your bedroom window. Well that's the exciting experience awaiting children in the new millennium, thanks to a project to restore lightkeepers' houses around the Irish coast.
It's a sight Gerald Butler (49) remembers well and he is delighted it will be experienced by future generations at Galley Head lighthouse in west Cork where he and his 14 brothers and sisters grew up.
"It was exciting, often it seemed as if it was raining spray - even though our house and the lighthouse were at the top of 100 ft high cliffs I remember the wind hitting the house wall, making the same cracking sound as if it was blowing a flag."
Located five miles south of Rosscarbery in west Cork, Galley Head is one of five lighthouses around the coasts included in a £500,000 millennium project to restore lightkeepers' houses.
Along with houses at Cromwell Point on Valentia Island, Loop Head in Co Clare, St John's Point in Co Down and Black Head in Co Antrim, the fine two-storey building at Galley Head will be restored.
The restoration will be carried out by the Irish Landmark Trust, an all-Ireland charitable conservation trust, which will lease the buildings from the Commissioners of Irish Lights for a nominal fee.
According to Tamsin Young of the trust, most properties targeted are unsuitable for modern living and often the greatest difficulty after restoration, is putting the buildings to productive use.
"The idea is to restore Galley Head and the other sites to their original state and make them ful ly accessible to the public both as holiday homes and through open days with the revenue generated being used for ongoing maintenance," she said.
The benefits of the project have already been outlined by the chairman of the National Millennium Committee, Mr Seamus Brennan, when he launched it last month at Wicklow Head lighthouse.
"This project will not only secure the future of these tangible links to our collective maritime past, but will also guarantee that the five famous headlands and their flora and fauna will remain in the public domain and not be lost to private interest."
It's a point well appreciated by Gerald Butler whose family connections in Irish Lights go back to his paternal and maternal grandparents and who followed both his parents into the service as first a lighthouse-keeper and more recently as an attendant.
"I'm absolutely delighted. I was afraid that the house might be sold and it would end up in foreign hands, so I think it's marvellous that the Irish Landmark Trust have got involved now to restore the house."
Although almost 120 years old, the house is in good condition, having being occupied until January by Gerald's mother, Pauline, who followed her own parents into Irish Lights after marrying a young lighthouse keeper, Larry Butler.
Indeed Pauline wrote a beautifully poignant piece on a lifetime in the lighthouse service for the Commissioners' magazine, Beam, in 1996 when she recalled how she and her husband, Larry courted her by semaphore at Eagle Head in Co Mayo.
Following marriage and stints at Wicklow Head and Roancarrig in Castletownbere, Pauline and Larry Butler went to Galley Head in 1951 where Larry was an assistant keeper to her father, Edmund Fitzgerald. That first visit to Galley Head was to last just two years, but after stints at Ballycotton, Dundalk and Mine Head in Co Waterford, the Butlers returned in 1965 to Galley Head where, after a few years, Larry Butler was promoted to principal keeper.
"Galley Head was electrified in 1969 and the assistant keeper was transferred I was appointed female assistant keeper," wrote Pauline recalling how the family - by now swelled to 15 children - had the entire station to themselves.
"We were never lonely there. I never found any lighthouse lonely, there's a romanticism about lighthouses and I think all the children loved growing up there. It was an exciting place but with a car, we never felt remote," she recalled this week.
Indeed, Bill Long on his book on Irish lighthouses, Bright Light, White Water, describes Galley Head as a veritable village, with its houses for not just the keepers but also the gas makers who provided the fuel for the original light.
BUILT and completed in 1878 by William Martin Murphy (he of the Great Lockout), Galley Head was fuelled by gas made from cannel coal and with its four tiers of light, was the biggest and brightest lighthouse at the time in the world.
It was converted to paraffin oil in 1907, giving it a output of 362,000 candle-power. When it was electrified in 1969 with a filament 3 kw bulb, its power increased to 2,800,000, allowing it increase its range from 24 miles to 28 miles out to sea.
The American science fiction writer, Ray Bradbury, is said to have been inspired to write his story, The Foghorn - where a sea monster falls in love with a lighthouse - by 19th-century reports of a 30ft sea serpent at Galley Head.
Larry Butler became attendant following his retirement as principal keeper in 1979 and after his death in 1992, Pauline became attendant - a position she held for seven years.
But three years on, how does Pauline Butler, who now lives in Riverstick with her daughter, Fidelma, feel at the prospect of her home at the Galley Head being restored and opened to the public?
"I'm really thrilled otherwise, it was a case of the house being sold and whoever bought it would have closed it off, but this way it'll be available to the public as a holiday home and I can go back to visit. Who knows, I may even go back for a holiday !"
