Collecting Kelp, Connemara, 1911

 This painting titled 'Collecting Kelp, Connemara' was painted in 1911 by William H. Bartlett, ROI, (1958-1932) and was sold at auction in 2015 for €10,000, considerably more than that ever earned by the kelp-gatherers of old.

A 'weed drag', is a type of long-handled, bent-tine, fork used for clearing rivers and lakes of weed. Seaweed gathering also utilised a drag fork like this, even today. Along the Connemara coast, in shallow bays and rocky inlets and islands, a variety of seaweed called kelp was cut above the root with a knife/saw attached to a long pole, and it then floated free. The buoyant kelp was gathered into floating piles or rafts, called 'cleimins', and towed, or poled to shore, or, if further out, on an island or deeper water, the weed was dragged into the boat with the special bent fork, brought to shore and spread along piers or walls to dry.

Harvesting seaweed on the Atlantic shore was hard and cold work, standing waist-deep in Autumn seawater, out below the low-water mark, cutting the seaweed by hand, and gathering it into bundles to be floated to shore. From there, someone had to carry the cut seaweed in bundles from the foreshore, up to the place where it was to be dried, before it was collected and loaded onto boats to be processed in Galway to extract iodine and potash. Men usually did the cutting and harvesting of the seaweed, while the women and children had the task of hauling the heavy, cold, wet, sea-sodden, smelly seaweed inshore. No seaweed baths needed for those hardy folk.

When the seaweed had dried it was burned in-situ, in sheltered rocky areas, to produce alkali or iodine. Alkali was an important and necessary commodity in the soap, glass and textile industries and

was manufactured from the burned ashes of vegetable substances (potash, kelp and barilla). Iodine became important for the advances in medicine and photography in the 19th century.

Archaeological evidence for the kelp industry includes kilns, drying-walls and storehouses which are found all along the Atlantic coastline from Wexford to Antrim.

From the 1850's the dried kelp was transferred by boat, usually Galway 'Hookers', from the scores of harbours along the coast, and from the Aran islands, to the Claddagh quay, and then carried onwards on smaller boats, through the locks on the Eglinton Canal into the Corrib, and on to Menlo where the Galway Iodine Works was located. There it was burned and iodine was extracted. The remainder, ash mainly, was used as fertiliser, and also used in the photographic, munitions, bleaching, glass-making, soap-making, ceramics, salt and linen industries.

The business of converting seaweed to iodine was very labour and fuel intensive, quite polluting, and was subject to.and later on victim of, competition from European and S. American sources of potash.

After WWI synthetic iodine replaced seaweed iodine, and that seaweed-based industry became obsolete. Seaweed was also harvested and burned locally, to produce fertiliser, though that practice has also died out, and was never really sufficiently financially rewarding to be sustainable.

Seaweed is still harvested in Connemara, and elsewhere on the Irish coastline, and is used to produce ingredients for cosmetics and food-additives. It is now collected 'wet' and does not have to be dried on the walls along the coast. Controversy still surrounds the sale of seaweed-collecting rights in Connemara to a Canadian cosmetics company, Arramara, around 2014.

You can buy seaweed to eat, Dulse and Carrigeen, to enjoy at home, from several Irish companies, healthy and worth supporting. You could also go for a seaweed bath, Leenane and Enniscrone are two of several locations on the west coast where such baths are offered today. Indeed Salthill, Galway was originally a victorian seaweed spa town, where folks took the salt air and the baths, for health in the late 19th century. The seaweed baths were where Seapoint now stands.

1Brian Nolan