While picking rubbish off the Cheekpoint foreshore recently, I made an incredible find. A collection of recently exposed timber poles on the shoreline suggested an old fishing weir. It was not a surprise in itself in a once-thriving fishing community. But having been reared on the shore and spending so much of my life wandering along it as a playground, a fisherman, and recently as a space for solitude and reflection, this shocked me.
Having absorbed the stories down the years, and more recently researching and recording others, never once did anyone suggest these poles were there. Is it a weir at all? Or perhaps an older weir long before the generation of my family was fishing from here? Hopefully, in time, more information will emerge.
Sketch of the poles and measurements by inches of the space between each pole.
close-up of pole #5 and one of three more I noticed after measuring the site
Data from the OSI Historic 6-inch BW accessed through the Heritage Maps Viewer at www.heritagemaps.ie, 22/12/2024. The red line gives an approximate location of the find. Note that the salmon weir is listed offshore and upriver from the find. Walsh’s homestead is on the shore, my great-grandmother Ellen Walsh was born here. My great-grandfather Joe Doherty and Ellen lived in the Russianside. My maternal side, the Morans, lived above the Dohertys… Morans Poles are named for them
A bit more detail from map on the weir. My theory is that the Salmon weir shown was removed after the hearings of 1860s when many of the weirs were shown to be new additions to the river.
A sense of the location from my phone. I think this also gives some sense of the distance from low water. The salmon weir shown in the map would be closer to the seaweed and rocks shown upriver from the site. Its possible this is the inside wing of the weir, but I think its too extensive.
Local information
No one I have spoken to at present can shed any further light on this find. I have to admit I was relieved when people like Pat Moran, Maurice Doherty or Tommy Sullivan confirmed what I thought initially – that this was unknown and only recently exposed.
My mother, now 83, remembers as a child visiting Tom Walsh in his garden on the shore there. Tom was a small man, very gentle, and he delighted in her company and insisted on buttering her a slice of bread and sprinkling sugar on it. He would sit in the garden, smoke his pipe while she ate her bread and ran after his cats.
I also checked the late Jim Doherty’s book on growing up in the area. Jim’s details on Tom Walsh tallies with my mothers but he also mentions an eroded roadway from Ryan’s Quay to the house (a partial part remains on the incline to the ruins now overgrown) and that he kept a scooneen (Local name for a short piece of salmon driftnet, moored in place) on the mud below the house.
Tom was a brother of Ellen Walsh who married Joe Doherty, my great-grandfather. A relation confirmed that the Doherty’s did have a weir on the shore. I was aware of that, but the location bested me – largely because I didn’t ask enough questions about it when younger. I’m still no closer to identifying the location for certain. In my last book, I recorded my great-great grandfather Andrew Doherty battling the cot men on one of the numerous trips they took to chop down the scotch weirs in the mid-19th century. If you have the book check out Chapter 6 on the Weir Wars. If not – briefly…the cot men came to Meades Weir (Meades Dock is still a placename on the shore between Cheekpoint and Passage East) and leaving there they proceeded up the shore. According to the piece in the Freeman’s Journal the next weir encountered was Dohertys. He knew many of them by name and so the cot men moved away. I’d imagine this was to avoid prosecution. But this does not give a location. We can only speculate that it is somewhere on the shore between Meades Dock and Cheekpoint.
Head Weirs and Scotch Weirs.
I’ve written extensively about the weirs – I’m blue in the face trying to excite people about their heritage value. Anyway, to reprise it head weirs date at least to the Norman era. The Scotch Weirs however seem to originate around 1815 approx. The two blogs below might give a better sense of them and their differences.
Conclusion
To conclude for now I want to mention my own thoughts. It may be part of the inside wing of the salmon weir shown on the old OSI map above. However, I think the extent of this is too large. My own theory is that this is the wing of another weir that was never recorded on maps and was removed either before or after the salmon weir on the OSI map was recorded. However, it’s also conceivable that it is older. Powers with greater resources than this project must explore that.
Could it have been a timber breakwater to shelter Walsh’s boats or those at Ryan’s Quay from northeast winds? I think it would have been more perpendicular to the shoreline to be effective. Or some form of landing stage for a small boat? I will report the find to the National Monuments Service after Christmas 2024, and will keep you posted of any further developments.
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