Valentia Island: From tetrapod to terabyte
Picture the scene: A fetid swamp with enormous tropical trees and ferns, gigantic insects.
Somewhere on a rocky plateau near the equator circa 385 million years ago in the Devonian period a creature known as a tetrapod, similar in appearance to a crocodile or shark, crawls out of the swamp and leaves a trail in the mud in its wake.
Footprints in the soft mud harden and over time become indentations in the rock. By the forces of plate tectonics this land eventually moves, a millimetre every few thousand years, breaks away and through several more geologic periods, ends up at a latitude of 51 degrees North as part of a small rocky outrcrop of what will eventually become Ireland.
After human settlement it becomes known as Oileain Dhairbhre and eventually Valentia Island.
The discovery of these tracks by a Swiss geology student on a field trip in 1992 is incredibly important in the study of life on Earth.
“It is the oldest in situ record in the world of a vertebrate walking on land. Before this all known vertebrates were fish. Over time they became more complex and evolved into mammals and eventually humans,’” according to the Department of Heritage.
The find is all the more remarkable because virtually all record of human or animal traces in what was then Ireland were wiped clean by the last ice age 10,000 years ago.
Mis-spelled as Valencia, Valentia, Co Kerry derives from Bhéil Inse, or the Island at the river mouth. Then it was variously transmogrified to its present form leaving visitors to wonder if there were some connection to Spain in its nomenclature. There isn’t of course.
Valentia is one of the most iconic placenames in Irish meteorology and recognisable with its peers on radio reports over the years … Mizen Head, Valentia, Slyne Head, Malin Head. It has a magnificent lighthouse which has withstood many a storm. It has been automated since 1947.
As a strategic point on the southwest of the country the Valentia lifeboat in the village provides a vital rescue service.
Valentia is also famous for having played a huge role in global communications. The terabytes of information hurtling through the air every second between every smartphone and computer globally can be said to have had their precursor in this essential node in the development of mass communication.
In 1866, 1,686 miles of transatlantic cable were laid between the island and Heart’s Content, Newfoundland. The cable reunited the two continents which had last been connected in the time of the tetrapod.
The Transatlantic Cable Station closed in 1966 when satellite technology allowed instant messages to be relayed.
It has been possible to drive to Valentia Island since 1971 when the Maurice O’Neill Memorial Bridge finally achieved what the islanders had been clamouring after for years.
The social needs of access to the mainland were overwhelming and the islanders lobbied hard for it. The 335m bridge took two-and-a-half years years to construct, and cost £500,000.
The Cork Examiner in 1954 referred to “unrest in Valentia due to the slowing up of the Valentia Island Bridge”.
"The islanders had threatened to withhold rates and even to boycott elections. In 1956 The Kerryman quoted an island shopkeeper, Dermot Walsh, saying they should be “treated as taxpayers and not prisoners on another Alcatraz.”
Valentia measures 11km by 3km and is quite hilly with spectacular views from its cliffs north to the Blaskets. Its famous slate quarry once exported rock globally.
The island has a population of around 650 with most people living near the village of Knightstown which was named after the Anglo Norman former proprietors of Valentia, the Fitzgeralds, who were known as the Knights of Kerry.
Maurice Fitzgerald hosted many luminaries including the Victorian poet Alfred Lord Tennyson, he of ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ repute.
Of his sojourn there in 1848 he wrote:
“At Valentia the sea was grand, without any wind blowing, and seemingly without a wave, but with the momentum of the Atlantic behind, it dashes up into foam, blue diamonds it looks like, all along the rock, like ghosts playing at hide and seek.”
Take the N70 80km west of Killarney and drive on to island!
www.valentiaisland.ie; The Life of Tennyson, Edmund Gosse, The North American Review; vol 165, No 492
