This small rocky inlet on the south-west corner of Valentia Island is where the first lasting transatlantic telegraph cable came ashore in 1866, after which a message that once took ten days by ship crossed the Atlantic in minutes. Come for that, not for the bay itself, which is a modest pebble-and-rock cove rather than a beach. The real draw is standing at the Telegraph Field above the water, picturing the cable being winched in, and then walking the cliffs of Bray Head that frame it.
What happened here
By the 1860s, linking Europe and North America by wire had defeated several well-funded attempts. The cable that finally held was laid in 1866, run from Foilhommerum Bay across to Heart’s Content in Newfoundland, and Valentia stayed a working link in the global network until the cable station closed in 1966 – almost exactly a hundred years. The cable itself was a serious piece of engineering: a copper core sheathed in gutta-percha and armoured with iron wire and hemp to survive the North Atlantic seabed. The transatlantic cable site is now on Ireland’s tentative list for UNESCO World Heritage status.
A word of honesty about the site: the Telegraph Field has been in private ownership since 2003, held by the Browne family of Castleisland, and at barely an acre it’s a small, plain patch of clifftop ground. There’s no visitor centre here – the full story is told at the Valentia Island cable station and museum at Knightstown, and this is the spot where the wire actually met the land.
Bray Head and the cliffs
The headland above the bay is the better part of a visit. The walk up Bray Head climbs to the ruins of an observation tower built in 1815, one of the chain of Napoleonic-era lookouts along this coast, and the view from there takes in the Skelligs out to sea on a clear day. There was once a copper mine near the bay, recorded in a 1922 Geological Survey, and the warm air of the Gulf Stream keeps wildflowers going on these slopes well into the autumn.
There’s an aviation footnote too: in 1927, Charles Lindbergh crossed over Valentia and Foilhommerum on the Spirit of St Louis, making his first European landfall here on the way to Paris – the same narrow stretch of Kerry coast marking another shrinking of the distance between the continents.
Practical information
Foilhommerum Bay is free and open year-round, signposted on the western side of Valentia Island, which is reached by the bridge at Portmagee off the Ring of Kerry (a car ferry also runs from Reenard Point to Knightstown, April to October). There’s roadside parking near the bay.
The path down to the shoreline crosses rough, uneven ground that gets slippery when wet, so wear proper footwear; it’s not suitable for limited mobility. Plan an hour here, and pair it with the cliff walk and the cable station at Knightstown to make sense of the whole story – the field on its own won’t, but the headland above it will repay the climb.