Valencia Island

An historical "node" in an interconnected world

From Bray Head on Valentia Island there is a view of the Skellig Islands. Valentia Island (Irish: Dairbhre, meaning "The Oak Wood") is one of Ireland's most westerly points. It lies off the Iveragh Peninsula in the southwest of County Kerry.

Valentia was the eastern terminus of the first commercially viable transatlantic telegraph cable. The first attempt in 1857 to land a cable from Ballycarbery Strand on the mainland just east of Valentia Island ended in disappointment. After subsequent failures of cables landed at Knightstown in 1858 and Foilhommerum Bay in 1865, the vast endeavor finally resulted in commercially viable transatlantic telegraph communications from Foilhommerum Bay to Heart's Content, Newfoundland in 1866. Transatlantic telegraph cables operated from Valentia Island for one hundred years, ending with Western Union International terminating its cable operations in 1966.

The electric telegraph is the beginning of the electric communication environment, where spatial relations are transformed by the possibility of instant communications between people in places near or distant. Centres and peripheries, as geographical and/or spatial terms, have to be re-imagined.

Telegraph Field, Valentia Island: Foilhommerum is the site of the first permanent communications link between Europe and the Americas. In October 2002, a memorial to mark the laying of the transatlantic cable to Heart's Content, Newfoundland was unveiled atop Foilhommerum Cliff. Made of Valentia slate and designed by local sculptor Alan Ryan Hall, the memorial marks the importance of the site to telegraph communications with North America from 1857 and to the work accomplished in accurately linking longitude measurements in North America to the Royal Observatory in Greenwich in 1866.

Today new cables criss-cross the seas and oceans of the planet and carry the connections that form the World Wide Web.