Civil Engineering heritage: Scotland - Lowlands and Borders
Date 2007
Event ID 577789
Category Descriptive Accounts
Type Publication Account
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/577789
Portpatrick to Donaghadee was a trade route between Scotland and Ireland from earliest times and there have been several attempts to construct a substantial harbour.
In 1768 John Smeaton proposed two breakwaters, north and south, the latter being completed in 1778. Efforts to build the north breakwater proved abortive due to the destructive action of the sea and finally abandoned in 1801. Telford was consulted in 1802 and found Portpatrick ‘destitute of the advantages requisite for a perfect harbour’, an opinion which was borne out by events.
Rennie was of the opinion that a satisfactory harbour could be made and, in 1818, produced a plan modelled on Smeaton’s for two massive piers and a lighthouse estimated to cost about £120 000. Two years later work began. An eye witness ‘saw 700–800 labourers digging, quarrying, trundling barrows and building by night and day in the light of blazing coals heaped up in cradle grates. He saw too the thousands of tons of Dumbartonshire freestone, Anglesey limestone, local whinstone and granite which was used in constructing breakwaters and piers. While work proceeded the din of the ocean was stilled by the clang of hammers, the suction of pumps, the hissing of boilers and the roar of Bellows.’ The south breakwater with its lighthouse was eventually completed in 1836, but the north pier was unfinished.
In 1839 a storm undermined the end of the south pier, endangering the lighthouse and causing £13 800 worth of damage, by which time costs on the project had exceeded £170 000. In 1849, when the Irish mail service was transferred to Stranraer, the extent of the harbour was as shown.
After the Portpatrick Railway Act was passed in 1857, an inner basin was excavated to the north of North Harbour, mainly in rock, to accommodate Irish Packet traffic. The railway arrived in August 1862 but the mail service never fully resumed at Portpatrick and after 1873 the harbour was abandoned. The lighthouse, redundant by the 1860s, was dismantled and re-erected at Colombo, Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, in 1871.
The inner harbour is now privately owned and managed, and well used by fishing and pleasure boats.
In 1901 details of a proposed alternative means of communication via an Irish Channel Tunnel were put forward by engineers Sir Douglas Fox and James Barton. They favoured the northernmost of three lines examined, involving a £10 million, 351/2 mile tunnel from Stranraer to Carrickfergus, of which 25 miles would have been under the sea. The project was considered practicable but funding was not forthcoming.
R Paxton and J Shipway 2007
Reproduced from 'Civil Engineering Scotland - Lowlands and Borders' with kind permission from Thomas Telford Publishers.
