pier/jetty

Pier, built 1826, "perfect" 1830; extant 1838, on a cranked L-shaped plan with granite ashlar battered walls having part repointed cut-granite coping supporting cut-granite mooring posts. Set extending into Cuan an Fhóid Duibh [Blacksod Bay].

A pier erected by William Henry Carter (1783-1859) of Castlemartin, County Kildare, 'chiefly at his own expense, and partly with the aid of a gift from government' (Parliamentary Gazetteer of Ireland 1846 I, 247), regarded as an important component of the early nineteenth-century maritime civil engineering heritage of Béal an Mhuirthead [Belmullet] with 'the accommodation afforded by the pier [being] sufficient encouragement to a merchant to settle there [and] where there was not a single corn store, and scarcely a house, there are now large stores and a thriving town' (Fourteenth Annual Report 1847, 3).