Overview
The Valentia Island Heritage Centre describes itself as ‘not a museum so much as a meeting place of today and yesterday, of you and us’ – fair warning that this is a volunteer-run village collection rather than a polished visitor centre, and the better for it. It fills the former Knightstown National School on School Road, built in 1861, extended in 1911 and closed as a school in 1976. Under one roof it runs from 385-million-year-old footprints to the cable that first carried a message under the Atlantic.
What’s inside
Three rooms carry the collection: the School Room and Island Life; a room on the island’s social, scientific and industrial history; and one given over to communication and the transatlantic cable. If your time is short, the cable room is the reason to come. Valentia’s genuine claim on world history is that the first lasting transatlantic telegraph cable came ashore here in 1866, laid by the Great Eastern and linking the island to Heart’s Content in Newfoundland; the room lays out the engineering and the people behind it, and a memorial on Foilhommerum Cliff marks the actual landing point.
The other headline exhibit is geological. Fossil tetrapod trackways found at Dohilla on the north coast in 1993 are around 385 million years old – some of the earliest evidence anywhere of a backboned animal walking on land. Around these two set-pieces, the displays take in the island’s slate quarry (its stone reached the British House of Commons), the 19th-century observatory and radio station, the ogham stones and holy wells, the RNLI and safety at sea, and Maude Delap, the self-taught marine biologist who became the first person to rear jellyfish through their full life cycle, working from her home on the island.
Visitor information
The centre opens April to September only – Monday to Saturday 10am–5pm, Sunday 2pm–5pm – so it is shut through the winter. Admission is €3.50 for adults, €3 for students and seniors, €10 for a family of two adults and two children, and free for under-12s. Allow an hour or two, more if you get talking at the desk.
Parking is the one thing the signs do not make obvious: the visitor car park is about 200 m before the building, opposite the Church of the Immaculate Conception, not directly outside. It is an old school building, so ring ahead if steps are a problem. The centre doubles as the island’s tourist information point, with maps and advice, which makes it the sensible first stop before you drive out to the cable memorial at Foilhommerum or up Geokaun Mountain.
- Phone: +353 (0)66 947 6411
- Email: valentiaislandheritagecentre@gmail.com
- Address: School Road, Knightstown, Valentia Island, Co. Kerry, V23 K299