OCEAN & ENVIRONMENT
Creative Places West Cork Islands
DISPATCH #2:
Tracing the Intertidal on Long Island
Tracing the Intertidal on Long Island
8 May 2026
Long lies the island, off the coast of Schull. Inishfada (Long Island), is one of the more elusive of the West Cork islands due to its small population and lack of readily available historical literature. I travel over with Sam on a Sunday morning in mid-March. The ferry takes five minutes to cross the sound, leaving from the tiny Colla harbour with islander Maurice at the helm. As well as driving the ferry and managing the postal service to the island, Maurice farms out in Goleen. As Oscar on Bere Island noted, “as anyone who lives on an island will know, it’s rare that one job will do you.”
Maurice tells us that there are 12 residents on the island at present. The full-time population was over 300 in the 1840s but this number has declined steadily since, apart from a small jump in the early 2000s. Since 2002, the population has wavered between 12 and 20 people.
Sam has the idea to try to trace the entire coast of the island on foot along the intertidal zone. The intertidal is non-privatised land, where licences must be granted to farm shellfish or harvest seaweed at a commercial scale. We set off from the pier with enthusiasm, picking our way across ridges of rock slippery with seaweed and lichen, encrusted with small shellfish. Sam is sure-footed, in his natural element, eyes alive to the browns, greens and purples of the different seaweeds found in the rich ecosystem of the intertidal. I’m unbalanced by a heavy backpack, gripping my toes inside their boots to prevent catastrophic slippage. We see bairneach (limpet), Dúlamán (channel wrack), carrageenan, glasán (sea lettuce), míobhán (pepper dulse), periwinkles. Sam says that the reproductive tips of the Dúlamán in the spring time can be used as a natural after-sun, and we smear some of the gel from the fronds on our faces.
At the first small cove we descend into, our access is crossed by a fence that joins land and sea. A double string of barbed wire and crumbling wooden posts follow a sharp spine of rock right down into the water. The fence makes no sense, considering the public nature of the strip of land between the sea and the field above it. I am reminded of accounts I’ve read of the seaweed wars that broke out in the late 1870s in Skerries, as well as in other parts of the country. The landlord of Skerries at the time, Hamilton, wanted to charge his tenants to harvest seaweed from the shoreline adjoining their land, a practice they’d been freely engaging in for generations. He built a wall to block their access, which they broke down in defiance of his demands for payment, sparking a bitter legal dispute that dragged on for years. “Hamilton claimed ownership of the shore and the islands… The Rush men claimed the shore was owned by the monarch on behalf of the people.” (1)
Long lies the island, off the coast of Schull. Inishfada (Long Island), is one of the more elusive of the West Cork islands due to its small population and lack of readily available historical literature. I travel over with Sam on a Sunday morning in mid-March. The ferry takes five minutes to cross the sound, leaving from the tiny Colla harbour with islander Maurice at the helm. As well as driving the ferry and managing the postal service to the island, Maurice farms out in Goleen. As Oscar on Bere Island noted, “as anyone who lives on an island will know, it’s rare that one job will do you.”
Maurice tells us that there are 12 residents on the island at present. The full-time population was over 300 in the 1840s but this number has declined steadily since, apart from a small jump in the early 2000s. Since 2002, the population has wavered between 12 and 20 people.
Sam has the idea to try to trace the entire coast of the island on foot along the intertidal zone. The intertidal is non-privatised land, where licences must be granted to farm shellfish or harvest seaweed at a commercial scale. We set off from the pier with enthusiasm, picking our way across ridges of rock slippery with seaweed and lichen, encrusted with small shellfish. Sam is sure-footed, in his natural element, eyes alive to the browns, greens and purples of the different seaweeds found in the rich ecosystem of the intertidal. I’m unbalanced by a heavy backpack, gripping my toes inside their boots to prevent catastrophic slippage. We see bairneach (limpet), Dúlamán (channel wrack), carrageenan, glasán (sea lettuce), míobhán (pepper dulse), periwinkles. Sam says that the reproductive tips of the Dúlamán in the spring time can be used as a natural after-sun, and we smear some of the gel from the fronds on our faces.
At the first small cove we descend into, our access is crossed by a fence that joins land and sea. A double string of barbed wire and crumbling wooden posts follow a sharp spine of rock right down into the water. The fence makes no sense, considering the public nature of the strip of land between the sea and the field above it. I am reminded of accounts I’ve read of the seaweed wars that broke out in the late 1870s in Skerries, as well as in other parts of the country. The landlord of Skerries at the time, Hamilton, wanted to charge his tenants to harvest seaweed from the shoreline adjoining their land, a practice they’d been freely engaging in for generations. He built a wall to block their access, which they broke down in defiance of his demands for payment, sparking a bitter legal dispute that dragged on for years. “Hamilton claimed ownership of the shore and the islands… The Rush men claimed the shore was owned by the monarch on behalf of the people.” (1)
1. Fencing crossing the intertidal zone
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2. Rusted anchors on Long Island
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The seaweed wars was a series of disputes over access to the shoreline and the resources to be found there, connected to the period of agrarian unrest known as The Land War. Seaweed was used to fertilise fields, so access to it was essential to farming at the time. Today, only 8% of the land in Ireland is public; the foreshore remains unprivatised, the bleeding edge of the idea of a commons that we no longer have.
The spectre of the seaweed wars has never fully gone away; conflict over traditional harvesting rights arose again this year as Canadian company Acadian Seaplants (owner of former Irish state body Arramara Teoranta) has made a repeat bid to secure rights for commercial harvesting of seaweed along the west coast. The bid has been met with widespread public opposition, with a petition against the move amassing thousands of signatures in days. As Cianna Devitt wrote recently on RTÉ.ie, “Ireland has had a long history of attempted coastal enclosure… Contests over the collection of seaweed… and purported shoreline trespass were a regular cause of litigation in 19th century Irish courts." (2)
The spectre of the seaweed wars has never fully gone away; conflict over traditional harvesting rights arose again this year as Canadian company Acadian Seaplants (owner of former Irish state body Arramara Teoranta) has made a repeat bid to secure rights for commercial harvesting of seaweed along the west coast. The bid has been met with widespread public opposition, with a petition against the move amassing thousands of signatures in days. As Cianna Devitt wrote recently on RTÉ.ie, “Ireland has had a long history of attempted coastal enclosure… Contests over the collection of seaweed… and purported shoreline trespass were a regular cause of litigation in 19th century Irish courts." (2)
3. Sam with Glasán on the shoreline.
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4. Kelp
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As Devitt points out, the attempt to assert rights came down to written versus oral proof, with the tenants who had long gathered seaweed to fertilise their fields asserting useage rights passed down through generations. This was pitted against the landlords’ assertion of rights through written documents. “Landowners wishing to demonstrate exclusive claims to the foreshore drew upon written evidence such as ancient Crown grants, patents, rental books and accounts, which articulated an apparently perpetual entitlement to the shore. For defendants, a claim of customary right could usually only be expressed in oral evidence, whereby one would recall a time-honoured habit of leading a horse and cart to the shore and collecting seaweed free of charge.” (3)
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5 & 6. Pages from Sam's notebook with notes taken on the day of the trip. The hand is coloured in with seaweed ink, "bringing awareness to the hand harvesting scale, the place we humans have on the coastline, and the place seaweed holds in our lives/bodies." (Sam)
As a seaweed harvester, Sam is regularly in the intertidal zone, though the scale of his harvesting is not large enough to necessitate a licence. It might be described as “ordinary reasonable enjoyment of the maritime area”, regulatory body MARA’s standard for non-commercial activity in the intertidal. Our journey over the inexplicable fence that crosses access to the small cove on Long Island recalls the journey of a group of farmers protesting tithes on access to the shoreline in the 1880s: “David Clarke, Patrick McCann, and James Laverty, along with a small number of local supporting witnesses, articulated a common custom of cross-generational seaweed collection, recounting how the men and women of the surrounding area traversed broken fences and dirt tracks to establish their right of way and prove customary use." (4)
7. Sam in the intertidal zone.
Once past the small cove, Sam and I continue our clamber around the edge of the island. The tide is going out, and we’re crossing that fluxing space that is sometimes shore, sometimes sea, the mysteriously amphibious landscape of the intertidal. After a short time, our path becomes impassable - cliffs sheer up on our left and it’s clear the western edge of the island we’re heading towards won’t accommodate our mission. We climb up away from the shore and into a field, which is criss-crossed with the wisps of cattle paths, winding through clumps of gorse and bramble. We head for the road, keen to cover more of the island in the time left before the return ferry than following the sinuous line of the coastline would allow.
We have so far seen nobody else. We pass houses that might contain people, some which definitely don’t. One house has CCTV cameras and no trespassing signs, something that is unusual to see on the islands. We’re down at the harbour eating a packed lunch, backs to a low stone wall, when Danny appears. He’s in a woollen jumper under oilskins, on his way to tend his boat. He is the first islander we’ve met and is eager to talk to us and share his knowledge of the island and the people who live there. German by birth, when he’s not on the island he works in Germany for the government as a soil scientist. He tells us there is good soil on Long Island, and that great food was grown here at one time.
A number of the houses on the island were built by the Congested Districts Board (CDB) in 1911, Danny tells us. He is in the process of renovating a CDB house formerly owned by his parents, who used it as a holiday home. He tells us that he would love to move to the island permanently, as ‘if world war III breaks out, this is where I want to be - not in Germany’.
The CDB was established by Arthur Balfour in 1891 with the stated aim of alleviating poverty along the western seaboard of Ireland. This has also been characterised as an attempt to ‘kill Home Rule with kindness.’ The contemporary analysis of its intentions and impacts is complex, but one noted outcome was its contribution to the eradication of the Rundale (Roinn Dáil) farming practice, Ireland’s communal land management system that was widespread in the 18th and 19th centuries. As Sinead Mercier describes it, “Roinn Dáil required communal and democratic deliberation; a Dáil was held annually to share out the use of the land (Roinn) between those who relied on it for subsistence. These deliberations took into account not only the social requirements of the included families, but the ecological abilities and realities of the land." (5)
We have so far seen nobody else. We pass houses that might contain people, some which definitely don’t. One house has CCTV cameras and no trespassing signs, something that is unusual to see on the islands. We’re down at the harbour eating a packed lunch, backs to a low stone wall, when Danny appears. He’s in a woollen jumper under oilskins, on his way to tend his boat. He is the first islander we’ve met and is eager to talk to us and share his knowledge of the island and the people who live there. German by birth, when he’s not on the island he works in Germany for the government as a soil scientist. He tells us there is good soil on Long Island, and that great food was grown here at one time.
A number of the houses on the island were built by the Congested Districts Board (CDB) in 1911, Danny tells us. He is in the process of renovating a CDB house formerly owned by his parents, who used it as a holiday home. He tells us that he would love to move to the island permanently, as ‘if world war III breaks out, this is where I want to be - not in Germany’.
The CDB was established by Arthur Balfour in 1891 with the stated aim of alleviating poverty along the western seaboard of Ireland. This has also been characterised as an attempt to ‘kill Home Rule with kindness.’ The contemporary analysis of its intentions and impacts is complex, but one noted outcome was its contribution to the eradication of the Rundale (Roinn Dáil) farming practice, Ireland’s communal land management system that was widespread in the 18th and 19th centuries. As Sinead Mercier describes it, “Roinn Dáil required communal and democratic deliberation; a Dáil was held annually to share out the use of the land (Roinn) between those who relied on it for subsistence. These deliberations took into account not only the social requirements of the included families, but the ecological abilities and realities of the land." (5)
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8 & 9. Buoys decorating the way to Cuas na Gualainne.
Danny tells us about a spring on the island that islanders collect water from, which emerges in Cuas na Gualainne, translated as ‘inlet of the shoulders’. He says he himself drinks only from the spring, and doesn’t drink the tap water. I am reminded of a conversation about Kelly kettles Sam and I had been having only minutes earlier while eating; he loves the idea of them, but thinks the need to carry the extra weight of the water to fill them kind of defeats the purpose. A clean source of drinking water from the land from which to fill a camping kettle is not something that can be relied upon any longer. At one time, all of the inhabited islands must have relied on local drinking water from wells or springs, but they are all now connected to the municipal water supply on the mainland. Danny tells us the islanders are immensely proud of their spring, and when we pay a visit to it, we can see that it’s tended with care as a feature of the landscape. The spring emerges in a small cove, decorated with colourful buoys which line the steps down and are strung up like bunting. The rock around the spurt of singing water has been embellished with small stones and shells, and a narrow pipe collects it into a steady stream for filling bottles.
Long Island has no public building as such - there is no community hall or pub, and the school house is derelict. This cove, with the lovingly tended spring, seems the closest thing to a public space on the island, alongside the rarely walked intertidal zone.
Long Island has no public building as such - there is no community hall or pub, and the school house is derelict. This cove, with the lovingly tended spring, seems the closest thing to a public space on the island, alongside the rarely walked intertidal zone.
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10. The spring in Cuas na Gualainne.
More than the mainland, Ireland’s coastal islands suggest the necessity of (re)establishing a version of community-sufficiency (as against self-sufficiency), where essential resources like water and land are shared according to useage rights. Long Island carries the traces of our historical and contemporary grappling with this issue: the fencing in the cove crossing the intertidal, against the backdrop of the ongoing national controversy over the sale of traditional seaweed harvesting rights to a multinational company; the CDB houses on the island, and the links this entity had to dissolving our communal land management system, the Roinn Dáil; and the spring, in Cuas na Gualainne, a rare source of clean drinking water that is held dear by the residents of the island. We plan to revisit, to talk further with Danny and hopefully some other islanders about the spring, and what it means to them.
We walk towards the west end of the island, where the terrain is rough and boggy, dropping off into dramatic cliffs. A lone seal bobbing far below in a cove turns his periscope head to follow our voices as we pass along the cliff-edge, two moving figures in a place where few things move.
We walk towards the west end of the island, where the terrain is rough and boggy, dropping off into dramatic cliffs. A lone seal bobbing far below in a cove turns his periscope head to follow our voices as we pass along the cliff-edge, two moving figures in a place where few things move.
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11 & 12. The cliffs at the western end of the island.
References
(1) https://oldskerries.ie/shenick-island/#:~:text=In%201878%2C%20a%20%E2%80%9Dwar%E2%80%9D,for%20each%20load%20of%20seaweed
(2) https://www.rte.ie/brainstorm/2026/0417/1568194-ireland-seaweed-access-legal-disputes-history-farmers/
(3) & (4) As above
(5) https://www.rundale.org/2025/10/31/buckled-under-a-love-of-the-land/
Words
Rachel Donnelly
Images
All images - Rachel
Except 5, 6 and 11 - Sam
This is the second in a series of written reflections that follows the Ocean & Environment projects as they unfold over 2026/2027, connecting the themes of the project across the islands to wider questions of how to build resilience in the face of climate change.
The Ocean & Environment artists are Samuel Arnold Keane, William Bock, Eoin Heaney, Saoirse Higgins and Louise Manifold. Writer in residence for the project is Rachel Donnelly.
This essay is a commission supported by Cork County Council's Creative Places West Cork Islands programme, under its Ocean & Environment initiative, With thanks to the West Cork Islands Creative Places Partnership for their continued support.
(1) https://oldskerries.ie/shenick-island/#:~:text=In%201878%2C%20a%20%E2%80%9Dwar%E2%80%9D,for%20each%20load%20of%20seaweed
(2) https://www.rte.ie/brainstorm/2026/0417/1568194-ireland-seaweed-access-legal-disputes-history-farmers/
(3) & (4) As above
(5) https://www.rundale.org/2025/10/31/buckled-under-a-love-of-the-land/
Words
Rachel Donnelly
Images
All images - Rachel
Except 5, 6 and 11 - Sam
This is the second in a series of written reflections that follows the Ocean & Environment projects as they unfold over 2026/2027, connecting the themes of the project across the islands to wider questions of how to build resilience in the face of climate change.
The Ocean & Environment artists are Samuel Arnold Keane, William Bock, Eoin Heaney, Saoirse Higgins and Louise Manifold. Writer in residence for the project is Rachel Donnelly.
This essay is a commission supported by Cork County Council's Creative Places West Cork Islands programme, under its Ocean & Environment initiative, With thanks to the West Cork Islands Creative Places Partnership for their continued support.