Valentia Island
From Freepedia
Valentia Island (Oilean Dairbhre in Irish), Europe's westernmost inhabited location, lies in the southwest of County Kerry in the Republic of Ireland. It is linked to the mainland by a bridge at Portmagee, as well as by a ferry which sails from Reenard Point to Knightstown, the island's main settlement. The permanent population of the island is 650, and the island is approximately 11 km long by 3 km wide.
Valentia was the eastern terminal of the first transatlantic telegraph cable, laid in 1857 and operated until 1966.
On the northwest of the island stands modest Glanleam House amid its famous sub-tropical gardens; protected by shelterbelts from Atlantic gales and never touched by frost, these gardens provide the mildest microclimate in Ireland. Starting in the 1830s, Sir Peter George Fitzgerald, the 19th Knight of Kerry (1808 – 1880) [1], planted these gardens and stocked them with a unique collection of rare and tender plants from the southern hemisphere, normally grown under glass in the British Isles. The gardens are laid out in a naturalistic style as a series of walks. There are plants from South America, Australia, New Zealand (the tallest tree ferns in Europe) Chile and Japan. The gardens are memorialized in a selected golden-variegated Luma apiculata "Glenleam Gold" that originated as a sport in the garden.
Attractions on the island also include a grotto with a statue of the Virgin Mary, in a former slate quarry that provided slatews for the UK's Houses of Parliament
In 1993, an undergraduate geology student discovered fossilised tetrapod trackways, footprints in mud preserved in Devonian rocks on a rock platform on the very coast. About 385 mya, a primitive vertebrate passed along a muddy shoreline in the equatorial swampland that is now southeastern Ireland and left prints as if in wet concrete. The prints were preserved by silt overlying them, and were converted to rock over the ages. The Valentia Island trackways are among the oldest signs of vertebrate life on land.
Viscount Valentia is the courtesy title in the British peerage of the Earl of Mountnorris; and references to Valentia appear in the Earl's former lands in Worcestershire, England.
