Hook Head Lighthouse, Co. Wexford

On the tip of the Wexford peninsula. The current tower was built between 1210 and 1230 by William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke, who had nearly been shipwrecked off this same coast a few years earlier. He commissioned the tower to guide ships to his port at New Ross and gave the local monks the surrounding land in return for keeping the light burning. The monks tended it until 1641. Various hands have kept it lit since. Hook Head is the second oldest operational lighthouse in the world. The Tower of Hercules in Spain is older by about a thousand years.