Last night I attended the 85th Birthday Celebrations & Commemorations on Spike Island in Cork Harbour.
Eagle-eyed readers will already have seen the fireworks photo I posted to this page yesterday. Readers with even better eye sight will have noticed that I replaced the image I uploaded yesterday with a slightly different version today. Call it me being peculiar, but I wanted to edit the photo on my computer today and make the best of the image. The one that I uploaded yesterday came from minimal editing in Lightroom on my phone while we waited for the ferry.
From the Spike Island website,
At Spike Island, we’re celebrating our 85th birthday this year with our annual Family Fun Evening and Fireworks Display, marking the date when Spike Island was officially handed from Britain to Ireland in 1938. In honour of this momentous occasion, we’ll be celebrating our Independence Day with a spectacular fireworks display, musical performances and family fare on Saturday 8th July.
Visitors will board the ferry across the world’s second largest natural harbour, enjoy a guided tour on arrival, explore the fort’s amazing museums and exhibitions and walk the amazing island nature trails. On this special night, there will also be family entertainment, children’s activities, pop-up musical performances, face painters and more.
To close the night, a fireworks display will launch 1300 fireworks into the sky over Cork Harbour, one for every inmate who died on the island in its three incarnations as a prison.
This year, to mark the 85th anniversary of the 1938 handover of the ‘Treaty Ports’ from Britain to Ireland, Spike Island is also hosting a new Handover Exhibition at Mitchel Hall featuring a newly added collection of original artefacts. Visitors will have the opportunity to view this exhibition telling the story of our independence on the evening of the celebrations event.
I booked my ticket late, so we arrived just before 8pm, did a tour of the fort, bought some food in the restaurant and settled down to wait until the fireworks started, accompanied by Strictly Cash, a Johnny Cash tribute band.
The fireworks went on for some time and were spectacular. We had a great time photographing them, and the images you see here are only a small selection of the images I shot.
The ferry back was supposed to be at midnight, but things got delayed. I think it might have been almost 1am by the time we reached Cobh. The rain held off all evening, until just after midnight, but luckily, I had an umbrella with me. Bizarrely, there was no sign of rain in Cobh at all!
| Aperture | ƒ/6.3 |
| Camera | ILCE-7M3 |
| Focal length | 24mm |
| ISO | 400 |
| Shutter speed | 1s |
