A fond childhood memory of summers in Tramore is attempting to hop around the Metal Man on Great Newtown Head while chanting “Keep far, keep far, keep far from me for I am the rock of misery.”
Legend also has it that any young woman who succeeded in hopping three times around the white pillar on which he stands would have a marriage proposal within a year, either that or a twisted ankle.
Victorian postcards featuring lines of women standing on one foot prove the popularity of the tradition, but the custom died out many years ago, along with access to the site.
Despite his 200 years of solitude on the Waterford coast, the Metal Man has a jaunty look about him.
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Dressed in the red, white, and blue uniform of a petty officer in the Royal Navy, he has one hand in his pocket while the other points out to sea. His pose reminds me of John Travolta taking to the dance floor in Pulp Fiction.
Anyone who has spent a winter in Tramore knows how quickly the bay can be transformed by a storm-force onshore wind. The ocean becomes a great symphony of sound and white fury. Waves crash into the promenade and shoot skyward against the cliffs.
One January morning in 1975, I saw the evidence for myself. A large coaster called the Michael was parked on the beach where it had pitched up during the night in a storm that rattled windows around the town.
The steel hull ensured that no lives were lost but it was a reminder of the many wrecks that litter the bay and the town’s greatest tragedy, the sinking of the Sea Horse on January 30th, 1816, with the loss of 363 lives.
The 350-ton Sea Horse was used as a transport ship to ferry British troops and their families from one garrison to the next, and from one war zone to another.
At the end of the Napoleonic Wars, it left Ramsgate for Cork carrying crew, and some 300 officers and men of the 2nd Battalion of the 59th Regiment of Foot along with 71 women and children.
In bad weather, the Sea Horse missed its landing at Cork.
It was just a few nautical miles from the relative safety of Waterford Harbour when it was dragged into the storm-tossed bay.
The ship, made of Irish oak, started to break up in mountainous seas and became stranded on a shoal of sand.
As it fell apart in the early afternoon, children were packed into trunks in the forlorn hope that they might make it to shore.
Local people could only watch in horror as the disaster unfolded a mile from the beach. They managed to pull just 30 survivors, all male adults, from the surf.
The disaster changed Tramore forever.
The Sea Horse was adopted as the town’s emblem and the bay became one of the first locations for a RNLI inshore lifeboat in Ireland in 1858.
Lloyds of London, aware of the risk that Tramore Bay could be mistaken for the entrance to Waterford Harbour, commissioned five pillars or navigational beacons to be erected on the bay’s headlands. Three on the west side at Great Newtown Head, and two on the east side at Brownstown Head.
These served as a countdown to the Hook Head lighthouse, the oldest intact operational lighthouse in the world, which has marked the entrance to Waterford Harbour for over 800 years.
The plinths that cap the five pillars suggest it was intended to place statues on them all. In the end only the cast iron Metal Man was raised on Great Newtown Head while a twin was sent to Rosses Point in Sligo.
They were both cast to a design by the Cork-born sculptor Thomas Kirk who can also take credit for the late departed Nelson’s Pillar in Dublin.
The Metal Man in Tramore was hoisted on to his pedestal in time to mark the eighth anniversary in 1824 of the sinking of the Sea Horse and to serve out the first of its 200 winters to date.
Despite the efforts of Waterford County Council, a land dispute has long denied visitors safe access to one of Waterford’s most visible tourist attractions. Another summer has passed and many visitors to the seaside town could only admire the structure from a great distance, giving unintended meaning to the words “Keep far, keep far, keep far from me.”