Qualla: Valentia Island

Valentia Island: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stinglehammer, CC BY-SA 4.0. On 27 July 1866, an operator at Foilhommerum Bay tapped out a message in Morse code. Seconds later, more than 1,800 miles away in Heart's Content, Newfoundland, the dots and dashes arrived. The ocean had just become a wire. Until that moment, news between Europe and North America traveled at the speed of a steamship; a query and its answer could take a month. After that moment, it took seconds. The eastern end of that transformation lay on this small island off the Kerry coast, where a copper cable came ashore in a slate-and-quartzite cove and changed how the world kept time.

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Image: Stinglehammer | CC BY-SA 4.0

Valentia Island: The Cable That Shrank an Ocean

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Shannon Ware, CC BY-SA 4.0. The success of 1866 came after a string of failures that would have broken less stubborn men. In 1857, a cable paid out from a ship between Ballycarbery Strand and Valentia snapped in deep water. The 1858 attempt, landed at Knightstown, carried only a few faint messages before th...

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Image: Shannon Ware | CC BY-SA 4.0

Valentia Island: Longitude, Finally Solved

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Espresso Addict, CC BY-SA 2.0. There is a quieter consequence of that cable, important to anyone who has ever flown a great-circle route. Before 1866, American maps and European maps disagreed about where America was, by roughly half a mile. The error came from chronometers carried by ship across the Atlantic;...

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Image: Espresso Addict | CC BY-SA 2.0

Valentia Island: Older Footprints

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ingo Mehling, CC BY-SA 3.0. The cable is not the oldest news on Valentia. In 1993, an undergraduate geology student found something extraordinary on a coastal slab at Dohilla on the island's north shore: a line of footprints in Devonian stone, made about 385 million years ago by a primitive four-limbed crea...

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Image: Ingo Mehling | CC BY-SA 3.0

Valentia Island: Lindbergh's First Sight of Europe

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Terryballard, CC BY-SA 3.0. On 21 May 1927, Charles Lindbergh, flying alone in the Spirit of St. Louis, raised land for the first time after thirteen hours over the Atlantic. The land he saw was Dingle Bay and Valentia Island. His chart, drawn before the spelling had fully settled, labeled it Valencia. He c...

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Image: Terryballard | CC BY-SA 3.0

Valentia Island: Standing on the Cliff at Foilhommerum

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kmcnamee, CC BY-SA 4.0. The cable house at Foilhommerum is gone, but the cove is still there, and the slate cliffs above it still angle into the swell exactly as they did when the cable came ashore. Storms here come in straight off the open Atlantic; the next landfall west is Newfoundland, where the oth...

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Image: Kmcnamee | CC BY-SA 4.0