1.
Irish language
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Irish, also referred to as Gaelic or Irish Gaelic, is a Goidelic language of the Indo-European language family originating in Ireland and historically spoken by the Irish people. Irish is spoken as a first language by a minority of Irish people. Irish enjoys constitutional status as the national and first official language of the Republic of Ireland and it is also among the official languages of the European Union. The public body Foras na Gaeilge is responsible for the promotion of the language throughout the island of Ireland and it has the oldest vernacular literature in Western Europe. The fate of the language was influenced by the power of the English state in Ireland. Elizabethan officials viewed the use of Irish unfavourably, as being a threat to all things English in Ireland and its decline began under English rule in the 17th century. In the latter part of the 19th century, there was a decrease in the number of speakers. Irish-speaking areas were hit especially hard, by the end of British rule, the language was spoken by less than 15% of the national population. Since then, Irish speakers have been in the minority, efforts have been made by the state, individuals and organisations to preserve, promote and revive the language, but with mixed results. Around the turn of the 21st century, estimates of native speakers ranged from 20,000 to 80,000 people. In the 2011 Census, these numbers had increased to 94,000 and 1.3 million, there are several thousand Irish speakers in Northern Ireland. It has been estimated that the active Irish-language scene probably comprises 5 to 10 per cent of Irelands population, there has been a significant increase in the number of urban Irish speakers, particularly in Dublin. In Gaeltacht areas, however, there has been a decline of the use of Irish. Údarás na Gaeltachta predicted that, by 2025, Irish will no longer be the language in any of the designated Gaeltacht areas. Survey data suggest that most Irish people think highly of Irish as a marker of identity. It has also argued that newer urban groups of Irish speakers are a disruptive force in this respect. In An Caighdeán Oifigiúil the name of the language is Gaeilge, before the spelling reform of 1948, this form was spelled Gaedhilge, originally this was the genitive of Gaedhealg, the form used in Classical Irish. Older spellings of this include Gaoidhealg in Classical Irish and Goídelc in Old Irish, the modern spelling results from the deletion of the silent dh in the middle of Gaedhilge, whereas Goidelic languages, used to refer to the language family including Irish, comes from Old Irish
2.
Inlet
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An inlet is an indentation of a shoreline, usually long and narrow, such as a small bay or arm, that often leads to an enclosed body of salt water, such as a sound, bay, lagoon, or marsh. In sea coasts, an inlet usually refers to the connection between a bay and the ocean and is often called an entrance or a recession in the shore of a sea, lake. A certain kind of created by glaciation is a fjord, typically but not always in mountainous coastlines. Complexes of large inlets or fjords may be called sounds, e. g. Puget Sound, Howe Sound, Karmsund. Some fjord-type inlets are called canals, e. g. Portland Canal, Lynn Canal, Hood Canal, and some are channels, e. g. Dean Channel and Douglas Channel. Tidal amplitude, wave intensity, and wave direction are all factors that influence sediment flux in inlets Alaska Panhandle British Columbia Coast Calanque Inside Passage Ria Bruun, Per, stability of Tidal Inlets, Theory and Engineering. Amsterdam, Elsevier Scientific Pub. Co. p.510, be pub co Coastal Inlets Research Program Hood Canal on Google Maps
3.
Irish Sea
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The Irish Sea, separates the islands of Ireland and Great Britain. It is connected to the Celtic Sea in the south by St Georges Channel, anglesey is the largest island within the Irish Sea, followed by the Isle of Man. The sea is occasionally, but rarely, referred to as the Manx Sea, the sea is of significant economic importance to regional trade, shipping and transport, fishing, and power generation in the form of wind power and nuclear power plants. Annual traffic between Great Britain and Ireland amounts to over 12 million passengers and 17 million tonnes of traded goods, the Irish Sea has undergone a series of dramatic changes over the last 20,000 years as the last glacial period ended and was replaced by warmer conditions. At the height of the glaciation the central part of the sea was probably a long freshwater lake. As the ice retreated 10,000 years ago the lake reconnected to the sea, becoming brackish, the International Hydrographic Organization defines the limits of the Irish Sea as follows, On the North. The Southern limit of the Scottish Seas, a line joining St. Davids Head to Carnsore Point. It is connected to the North Atlantic at both its northern and southern ends, to the north, the connection is through the North Channel between Scotland and Northern Ireland and the Malin Sea. The southern end is linked to the Atlantic through the St Georges Channel between south eastern Ireland and Pembrokeshire in Wales, and the Celtic Sea. The Irish Sea is composed of a channel about 300 km long and 30–50 km wide on its western side. The western channels depth ranges from 80 metres up to 275 m in the Beauforts Dyke in the North Channel, the main embayments – Cardigan Bay in the south and the waters to the east of the Isle of Man – are less than 50 m deep. The Sea has a water volume of 2,430 km3, 80% of which is to the west of the Isle of Man. The largest sandbanks are the Bahama and King William Banks to the east and north of the Isle of Man, the Irish Sea, at its greatest width, is 200 km and narrows to 75 km. Unlike Great Britain, Ireland has no tunnel or bridge connection to continental Europe, thus the vast majority of heavy goods trade is done by sea. The Port of Liverpool handles 32 million tonnes of cargo and 734 thousand passengers a year, Holyhead port handles most of the passenger traffic from Dublin and Dún Laoghaire ports, as well as 3.3 million tonnes of freight. Ports in the Republic handle 3,600,000 travellers crossing the sea each year and this has been steadily dropping for a number of years, probably as a result of low cost airlines. There is also a connection between Liverpool and Belfast via the Isle of Man or direct from Birkenhead, the worlds largest car ferry, Ulysses, is operated by Irish Ferries on the Dublin Port–Holyhead route, Stena Line also operates between Britain and Ireland. The Port of Barrow-in-Furness, despite being one of Britains largest shipbuilding centres, a ferry crossing used to run between Swansea and Cork, but given the geographical limits defined above, this route crosses the Celtic Sea rather than the Irish Sea
4.
Coast
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A coastline or a seashore is the area where land meets the sea or ocean, or a line that forms the boundary between the land and the ocean or a lake. A precise line that can be called a coastline cannot be determined due to the Coastline paradox, the term coastal zone is a region where interaction of the sea and land processes occurs. Both the terms coast and coastal are often used to describe a location or region, for example, New Zealands West Coast. Edinburgh for example is a city on the coast of Scotland, a pelagic coast refers to a coast which fronts the open ocean, as opposed to a more sheltered coast in a gulf or bay. A shore, on the hand, can refer to parts of the land which adjoin any large body of water, including oceans. Similarly, the related term refers to the land alongside or sloping down to a river or to a body of water smaller than a lake. Bank is also used in parts of the world to refer to an artificial ridge of earth intended to retain the water of a river or pond. According to the UN atlas, 44% of people live within 150 kilometres of the sea, tides often determine the range over which sediment is deposited or eroded. Areas with high tidal ranges allow waves to reach farther up the shore, the tidal range is influenced by the size and shape of the coastline. Tides do not typically cause erosion by themselves, however, tidal bores can erode as the waves surge up river estuaries from the ocean. Waves erode coastline as they break on shore releasing their energy, the larger the wave the more energy it releases and the more sediment it moves. Coastlines with longer shores have more room for the waves to disperse their energy, while coasts with cliffs and short shore faces give little room for the wave energy to be dispersed. In these areas the wave energy breaking against the cliffs is higher, sediment deposited by waves comes from eroded cliff faces and is moved along the coastline by the waves. This forms an abrasion or cliffed coast, sediment deposited by rivers is the dominant influence on the amount of sediment located on a coastline. Today riverine deposition at the coast is often blocked by dams and other human regulatory devices, like the ocean which shapes them, coasts are a dynamic environment with constant change. The coast and its adjacent areas on and off shore are an important part of a local ecosystem, Salt marshes and beaches also support a diversity of plants, animals and insects crucial to the food chain. The high level of biodiversity creates a level of biological activity. More and more of the people live in coastal regions
5.
Ireland
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Ireland is an island in the North Atlantic. It is separated from Great Britain to its east by the North Channel, the Irish Sea, Ireland is the second-largest island of the British Isles, the third-largest in Europe, and the twentieth-largest on Earth. Politically, Ireland is divided between the Republic of Ireland, which covers five-sixths of the island, and Northern Ireland, in 2011, the population of Ireland was about 6.4 million, ranking it the second-most populous island in Europe after Great Britain. Just under 4.6 million live in the Republic of Ireland, the islands geography comprises relatively low-lying mountains surrounding a central plain, with several navigable rivers extending inland. The island has lush vegetation, a product of its mild, thick woodlands covered the island until the Middle Ages. As of 2013, the amount of land that is wooded in Ireland is about 11% of the total, there are twenty-six extant mammal species native to Ireland. The Irish climate is moderate and classified as oceanic. As a result, winters are milder than expected for such a northerly area, however, summers are cooler than those in Continental Europe. Rainfall and cloud cover are abundant, the earliest evidence of human presence in Ireland is dated at 10,500 BC. Gaelic Ireland had emerged by the 1st century CE, the island was Christianised from the 5th century onward. Following the Norman invasion in the 12th century, England claimed sovereignty over Ireland, however, English rule did not extend over the whole island until the 16th–17th century Tudor conquest, which led to colonisation by settlers from Britain. In the 1690s, a system of Protestant English rule was designed to materially disadvantage the Catholic majority and Protestant dissenters, with the Acts of Union in 1801, Ireland became a part of the United Kingdom. Northern Ireland saw much civil unrest from the late 1960s until the 1990s and this subsided following a political agreement in 1998. In 1973 the Republic of Ireland joined the European Economic Community while the United Kingdom, Irish culture has had a significant influence on other cultures, especially in the fields of literature. Alongside mainstream Western culture, an indigenous culture exists, as expressed through Gaelic games, Irish music. The culture of the island shares many features with that of Great Britain, including the English language, and sports such as association football, rugby, horse racing. The name Ireland derives from Old Irish Eriu and this in turn derives from Proto-Celtic *Iveriu, which is also the source of Latin Hibernia. Iveriu derives from a root meaning fat, prosperous, during the last glacial period, and up until about 9000 years ago, most of Ireland was covered with ice, most of the time
6.
Bay
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A bay is a recessed, coastal body of water that directly connects to a larger main body of water, such as an ocean, lake, or another bay. A large bay may be called a gulf, sea, sound, a cove is a type of smaller bay with a circular inlet and narrow entrance. A fjord is a particularly steep bay shaped by glacial activity, bays can be the estuary of a river, such as the Chesapeake Bay, an estuary of the Susquehanna River, which is the largest bay in North America. Bays may also be nested within each other, for example, some large bays, such as the Bay of Bengal and the Hudson Bay, have varied marine geology. The land surrounding a bay often reduces the strength of winds, bays were significant in the history of human settlement because they provided a safe place for fishing. Later they were important in the development of sea trade as the safe anchorage they provide encouraged their selection as ports, there are various ways from which bays can be created. The largest bays have developed as a result of plate tectonics, as the super-continent Pangaea broke up along curved and indented fault lines, the continents moved apart and the worlds largest bays formed. These include the Gulf of Guinea, Gulf of Mexico and the Bay of Bengal, another way bays form is via glacial and river erosion. A bay formed by a glacier is a fjord, rias are created by rivers and are characterised by more gradual slopes. Currents can make waves more constant, and soft rocks speed erosion, hard rock eroded less quickly, leaving headlands. The Gulf of California is an example of a bay created by plate tectonics as Baja California peninsula moves away from the Mexican mainland, Bay platform Great capes Headlands and bays
7.
Dublin
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Dublin is the capital and largest city of Ireland. Dublin is in the province of Leinster on Irelands east coast, the city has an urban area population of 1,345,402. The population of the Greater Dublin Area, as of 2016, was 1,904,806 people, founded as a Viking settlement, the Kingdom of Dublin became Irelands principal city following the Norman invasion. The city expanded rapidly from the 17th century and was briefly the second largest city in the British Empire before the Acts of Union in 1800, following the partition of Ireland in 1922, Dublin became the capital of the Irish Free State, later renamed Ireland. Dublin is administered by a City Council, the city is listed by the Globalization and World Cities Research Network as a global city, with a ranking of Alpha-, which places it amongst the top thirty cities in the world. It is a historical and contemporary centre for education, the arts, administration, economy, the name Dublin comes from the Irish word Dubhlinn, early Classical Irish Dubhlind/Duibhlind, dubh /d̪uβ/, alt. /d̪uw/, alt /d̪u, / meaning black, dark, and lind /lʲiɲ pool and this tidal pool was located where the River Poddle entered the Liffey, on the site of the castle gardens at the rear of Dublin Castle. In Modern Irish the name is Duibhlinn, and Irish rhymes from Dublin County show that in Dublin Leinster Irish it was pronounced Duílinn /d̪ˠi, other localities in Ireland also bear the name Duibhlinn, variously anglicized as Devlin, Divlin and Difflin. Historically, scribes using the Gaelic script wrote bh with a dot over the b and those without knowledge of Irish omitted the dot, spelling the name as Dublin. Variations on the name are found in traditionally Irish-speaking areas of Scotland, such as An Linne Dhubh. It is now thought that the Viking settlement was preceded by a Christian ecclesiastical settlement known as Duibhlinn, beginning in the 9th and 10th century, there were two settlements where the modern city stands. Baile Átha Cliath, meaning town of the ford, is the common name for the city in modern Irish. Áth Cliath is a name referring to a fording point of the River Liffey near Father Mathew Bridge. Baile Átha Cliath was an early Christian monastery, believed to have been in the area of Aungier Street, there are other towns of the same name, such as Àth Cliath in East Ayrshire, Scotland, which is Anglicised as Hurlford. Although the area of Dublin Bay has been inhabited by humans since prehistoric times and he called the settlement Eblana polis. It is now thought that the Viking settlement was preceded by a Christian ecclesiastical settlement known as Duibhlinn, beginning in the 9th and 10th century, there were two settlements where the modern city stands. The subsequent Scandinavian settlement centred on the River Poddle, a tributary of the Liffey in an area now known as Wood Quay, the Dubhlinn was a small lake used to moor ships, the Poddle connected the lake with the Liffey. This lake was covered during the early 18th century as the city grew, the Dubhlinn lay where the Castle Garden is now located, opposite the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin Castle
8.
Howth Head
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Howth Head is a peninsula northeast of Dublin city in Ireland. Howth falls under the governance of Fingal County Council. Entry to the headland is at Sutton while the village of Howth, baily Lighthouse is on the southeastern part of Howth Head. Nearby are the districts of Baldoyle and Portmarnock, the earliest mention of the peninsula was on a map attributed to Claudius Ptolemy, where it was called Edri Deserta or in Greek Edrou Heremos. Here it was portrayed as an island, but it is not clear if this was due to separation from the headland or inaccurate information available to the cartographer. There are two stations on or near the head. Sutton station is on the not far away and Howth station is on the head in the village of Howth. Both are served by Dublin Area Rapid Transit trains and have regular services to, historically the Hill of Howth Tramway ran between the stations around the head between 1901 and 1959. Additionally Dublin Bus routes serve the head, there are also craggy areas such as Muck Rock, and Kilrock, and there are steep sea cliffs around parts, especially on the north coast. Gorse grows in places on the headland. Fires are frequent during dry summers, the cliffs support a large colony of seabirds, notably razorbills, common guillemots, fulmars, kittiwakes and great cormorants. The scrubland above supports several species including skylarks, meadow pipits, whitethroats, linnets, stonechats and whinchats. The most commonly seen birds of prey are kestrels, peregrine falcons, as one of the northern termini of the Dublin Area Rapid Transit system, Howth is a popular destination for day-trippers from the capital. Hikers can choose from a range of routes, including the Cliff Walk or making for the ancient cairn on one of Howths several summits. On clear days, the Wicklow Mountains can be seen, with Dublin city below, slieve Donard, an 852 metre peak in Northern Ireland may also be visible - a distance of 90 km. Quite frequently, Snowdon in Snowdonia National Park in Wales can also be seen - a distance of 138 km, Howth Head is the location where Leopold Bloom proposes to Molly in James Joyces Ulysses. In the short story Eveline, another work of James Joyces from the collection, Dubliners, it is mentioned that Eveline and her family once had a picnic on the Hill of Howth. Howth Head is also central to Joyces final work, Finnegans Wake, in one of the principal characters, HCE, is, among other things
9.
Bull Island
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The island, with a sandy beach known as Dollymount Strand running its entire length, is a relatively recent, and inadvertent, result of human intervention in the bay. In times past, Dublin Bay had a problem with silting. Captain William Bligh, of Bounty fame, surveyed Dublin Bay for the Ballast Board in 1801 and its purpose was to clear a sandbar by Venturi action. A wooden bridge, the first Bull Bridge, was erected in 1819 to facilitate the construction of a wall, based on a design by Ballast Board engineer. Started in 1820, the Bull Wall was completed in 1825, over the succeeding 48 years, the natural tidal effects created by the walls deepened the entry to the Liffey from 1.8 m to 4.8 m. Much of the silt now scoured from the course was deposited on the North Bull. A lighthouse sits on the North Bull Wall, the island continued to grow in extent, from the Bull Wall towards Howth Head. Usable at low tide, this 150m track allowed access to the island for leisure, between 1906 and 1907, a new Bull Bridge was constructed – it is still standing. Then, in 1912, the Dollymount Sea Scouts were formed, taking part of the disused Coast Guard station as their den – the troop continues to operate from there, now called 5th Port Dollymount. The British Army commandeered the island on 5 September 1914, for military training – primarily as a firing range. The first drive-in at what was a course until 1989. In 1931, a plan was proposed to develop the island, further plans were advanced by Bord Failte, including conversion of much of the island as a theme park. Annes Golf Club rent from the Council, the bulk of the island comprises the largest park owned by the city. There are just a few residents on the island, in houses beside the bridge built by the Dublin Port Company for its employees. In addition to the clubhouses of the two clubs, there is the newly re-built Sea Scout den at the Clontarf end. At the end of the North Bull Wall is the famous Star of the Sea statue, funded by Dublin Port workers and sailors, however, the risk of this is considered small due to the strength of currents and depth of water in Sutton Channel. The island is primarily a sand structure approximately 5 km long and 1 km wide, the southeast facing side is a flat beach, backed by marram-grass-anchored dunes, scrub and marsh. On the northern side of the Bull, between the island and the mainland, is a large linear saltmarsh complex backed by all of which are covered at high tide
10.
Dollymount
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Dollymount, often known as Dollyer to Dubliners, is a coastal suburban area on the north coast of Dublin Bay, within Clontarf, on the northside of Dublin, Ireland, just East of Saint Annes Park. Dollymount is primarily residential, having just a few shops and a restaurant, most commercial facilities are found in the main Clontarf centres. The area has a Roman Catholic church, St. Gabriels, a much earlier plan to build a second Clontarf Church of Ireland parish church in Dollymount to complement the church on Seafield Road was abandoned in the 19th century. Manresa Jesuit Centre of Spirituality, located in what was Baymount Castle, is a Jesuit retreat house which hosts meetings, visitors on retreat regularly record their appreciation of neighbouring Saint Annes Park, Bull Island and Dollymount Strand. Dollymount lies within the district of Clontarf, which surrounds it, for history before the 19th century, see the relevant article. It is stated that the designation was adopted in the first instance by a member of the Vernon family as a compliment to his wife, by name Dorothy, the Green Lanes are still referred to as simply Clontarf in Thoms Irish Almanac & Official Directory of 1849. List of towns and villages in Ireland
