EVER looked out over the horizon and wondered what lies beneath the blue?
The Department of Culture Heritage and the Gaeltacht has just launched a new interactive map with details of all of the shipwrecks recorded off the Co Clare coast (as well as country wide).
The ‘Wreck Viewer’ map has information on nearly 20,000 shipwrecks off the Irish coast and in our inland waterways, with a fair amount of these off Co Clare.
The shipwrecks include everything from prehistoric logboats to medieval trading vessels, warships and ocean liners.
The map shows the site of the San Esteban, one of the Spanish Armada fleet, shipwreck in Doughmore bay in Doonbeg in 1588.
The survivors were later executed in Spanish Point.
The Wentworth Beaumont/Wentworth went down off Carraigaholt, one mile west of Kilcreadane Lighthouse in 1873.
Minister for Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, Josepha Madigan said: “Of particular interest, in this decade of centenaries, are the stories of those wrecks from the First World War.
“Over 1000 ships were lost off the coast of Ireland during that conflict, in effect bringing the Western Front to our shoreline and alerting the Irish people to both the grim realities of war and the scale of the tragic loss of life that took place on land and sea.”
Check out the map here.
