Qualla: Greencastle Lifeboat Station

Greencastle Lifeboat Station: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Malcolm Neal, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Tuns Bank lies in the seaway. A long submarine sandbar at the mouth of Lough Foyle, it sits directly in the track of any vessel making the passage between the Atlantic and Derry's port. In good weather it is invisible. In storm, when waves break shorter and steeper over its shoaling water, it has been the graveyard of more ships than the surrounding seas remember. The RNLI built a lifeboat station at Greencastle in 1864 specifically to guard the Tuns Bank - because the dangerous bar lay in the path of 'the numerous passenger-ships which are constantly entering and leaving the port'. Those passenger ships, in the 1860s, were carrying Irish emigrants to America. Hundreds of thousands of them. The Greencastle lifeboat existed, in essence, to save the emigrants - the men and women and children of the Famine generation who had bought their tickets, walked to Derry, and were sailing past the Tuns Bank toward whatever was waiting for them across the Atlantic.

Image: Malcolm Neal | CC BY-SA 2.0

Greencastle Lifeboat Station: 1853: The Harmony

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Malcolm Neal, CC BY-SA 2.0. Eleven years before the lifeboat station opened, on 12 March 1853, the schooner *Harmony* foundered in a gale just off Greencastle harbour. Ten men in a small open yawl, led by H.M. Coastguard boatman William Brice, pulled out into the storm and rescued three men and a woman from...

Image: Malcolm Neal | CC BY-SA 2.0

Greencastle Lifeboat Station: 1864: Establishment

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Malcolm Neal, CC BY-SA 2.0. In July 1864 the RNLI's journal *The Lifeboat* announced that a station had been established at the entrance to Lough Foyle. The first boat was a 28-foot lifeboat. The committee specifically mentioned 'the dangerous Tuns Bank' as the reason for the station - and noted that while ...

Image: Malcolm Neal | CC BY-SA 2.0

Greencastle Lifeboat Station: 1871 Upgrade and the L. G. Biglow

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Malcolm Neal, CC BY-SA 2.0. By 1871 the original 28-foot boat was judged insufficient. 'So many large emigrant ships are constantly leaving the Port of Londonderry,' the committee minutes record, 'and should accidents happen to them at the entrance of Lough Foyle, where the boat is placed, a larger boat was...

Image: Malcolm Neal | CC BY-SA 2.0

Greencastle Lifeboat Station: Mary Beckwith, Brittan Willis

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Malcolm Neal, CC BY-SA 2.0. RNLI lifeboats were funded by individual legacies - the donor naming the boat, the name lasting as long as the original endowment provided maintenance money. When Mary Beckwith of Tynemouth died in 1880, her £800 legacy was assigned to the Greencastle station, and the existing li...

Image: Malcolm Neal | CC BY-SA 2.0

Greencastle Lifeboat Station: The California and the End

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Malcolm Neal, CC BY-SA 2.0. On the evening of 28 June 1914, in dense fog and calm seas, the Anchor Line ocean liner *California* ran aground on Tory Island off the north Donegal coast. There were 1,100 passengers and 270 crew aboard. Multiple lifeboats were called to the scene; the Greencastle boat *Brittan...

Image: Malcolm Neal | CC BY-SA 2.0