![]() “The 1804 plans and later drawings make no reference to the staircase, so it truly was a most pleasant shock to see this door leading off this chamber of secrets to such a beautiful piece of stonework,” Crotty said in a press release, Large animal bones and half-drunk bottle of wines were found at the foot of the stairs. The original 10-acre British fortress was built in the late 1700s, but was considered too small to protect the Empire from potential invasion by Napoleon’s forces, so a second, much larger, 24-acre fort was built in 1804.Įxcavation work on a tunnel leading from the inner fortress to the outer moat recently revealed a secret spiral stone staircase, which was not recorded on any of the island’s plans. It gradually developed into a British military base in the 18th century, before it became a depot for convicts waiting to be shipped to Britain’s penal colonies, such as Australia and Bermuda. Spike Island – often described as “Ireland’s Alcatraz” – has a multilayered history.Įarly records indicate the 104-acre island might have been a 6th-century monastic settlement. In August 2020, island manager John Crotty announced one of the biggest discoveries yet: a secret stone spiral staircase dating back to the end of the 18th century. ![]() Over the past seven years, O’Donnabhain and his team have uncovered some of the mysteries buried on Spike Island – including a grizzly procedure long ago carried out on dead prisoners’ corpses. In an attempt to learn more about the men who perished on this prison island, bioarchaeologist Barra O’Donnabhain began excavating the convict graveyard in 2013. While Spike Island was welcoming boatloads of tourists pre-pandemic – much like Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay or Robben Island off the coast of South Africa – in Victorian times it was a place that many never left, with more than 1,000 prisoners dying there in less than four years. ![]() A star-shaped fortress atop a picturesque island off the southwest coast of Ireland once housed one of the world’s biggest prison populations. ![]()
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