Qualla: Haulbowline

Haulbowline: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Hawgood, CC BY-SA 2.0. The world's first yacht club was founded on this island in 1720, more than a century before the Royal Yacht Squadron at Cowes. Today the same 80-acre lump of rock in Cork Harbour holds the headquarters of the Irish Naval Service, with grey patrol vessels tied alongside Georgian storehouses built when the British Empire was rebuilding from the Napoleonic Wars. Between those two facts lies a strange third: for sixty-two years, half the island was an enormous slag heap. Irish Steel poured chromium 6 and radioactive waste into the eastern foreshore from 1939 until 2001. Erin Brockovich came over from California to look at it. The recent transformation back into parkland was so expensive that the Irish Examiner asked, in print, whether anyone should be allowed to walk on it yet.

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Image: David Hawgood | CC BY-SA 2.0

Haulbowline: Eels and Foxes

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit derek menzies, CC BY-SA 2.0. The name probably comes from Old Norse, ál-boling - 'eel dwelling,' the place where conger eels lived. Seventeenth and eighteenth-century spellings end in '-ing,' suggesting a Norse root that nautical English later smoothed into the modern form. The Irish-language name is more im...

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Image: derek menzies | CC BY-SA 2.0

Haulbowline: The Cork Water Club

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Oliver Dixon, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 1720 a group of Cork gentlemen began meeting on Haulbowline to sail together. They called themselves the Cork Water Club, and they made up rules of conduct, dress and racing that survive. The club later evolved into the Royal Cork Yacht Club, which is still active today and cl...

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Image: Oliver Dixon | CC BY-SA 2.0

Haulbowline: Ordnance and Victualling

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit William Murphy from Dublin, Ireland, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 1806, when the British Army shifted its presence to nearby Spike Island, Haulbowline was divided up - 14 acres went to the Royal Navy and 8 to the Board of Ordnance. A great stone wall split the island. On the western side an Ordnance Yard was built, a Martello tower for defen...

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Image: William Murphy from Dublin, Ireland | CC BY-SA 2.0

Haulbowline: Irish Steel

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Juri300(Tino Juric), CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1939 a new tenant moved onto the eastern half of the island, on the site of the old 1869 Dockyard. Irish Steel - later Irish Ispat - made steel here for sixty-two years. The waste went onto the foreshore. By the time the plant closed in 2001 it had added 22 acres of slag to th...

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Image: Juri300(Tino Juric) | CC BY-SA 4.0

Haulbowline: Naval Service Today

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Irish Defence Forces from Ireland, CC BY 2.0. The western half of the island is now the home of the Irish Naval Service - headquarters, training facilities, ship berths, and the Naval College. The whole campus sits largely within the footprint of the old Royal Navy Ordnance Yard. In September 2014 Minister for Defence Simon ...

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Image: Irish Defence Forces from Ireland | CC BY 2.0