Tuesday, July 12, 2016

Arklow Maritime Museum #173

Today I visited Arklow to recycle some waste and took the opportunity to check out the Arklow Maritime Museum located in the Bridgewater Centre on the northern side of the Avoca River. It is a small museum and does not take long to tour around the many exhibits.


Arklow is steeped in maritime history as it has been a port for hundreds of years. An Arklow trawler saved some of the passengers on the doomed Lusitania in 1915 as it happened to be fishing nearby. Lots of Arklow men died on shipping in both the first and second world wars. Many ships have been built at the Tyrrell Shipyard in Arklow. The museum has lots of pictures and scale models of boats - it's not clear if they were all built in Arklow. There's a great display of block and tackle used for careening (beaching boats and cleaning one side at a time) - we are told that some of this could be over 400 years old. In more recent years Arklow was a port of call for the development of the Arklow Bank Wind Farm.


At a fiver, a visit to the museum is good value. I was the only visitor to the museum during my tour, unfortunately the two attendants who were there talked non-stop out loud about mobile phones. Perhaps they were unaware that their voices and their boring chit-chat filled the small museum, perhaps they didn't care.

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