North Atlantic Skyline » salthill promenade

Galway construction : Salthill apartments

John Smyth — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 21:45:28 +0000

First thing most Saturday mornings, my wife and I head down to Salthill Promenade, buy take-out coffee in Coco and drink it either while walking along the beach or while standing on the slipway across from the Waterfront Hotel. That way, we get a much needed fix of both caffeine and the sea air at the same time.

The Garda Station in Salthill is very close to the Prom but is hidden behind the building adjacent to the Waterfront Hotel. For a brief period in 2008, the Gardaí in the station had a view of the sea – the station is the yellow building visible over the hoarding in the top picture in the sequence above. I don’t have a picture of the row of buildings before the old one was knocked, and I can’t remember what was there before.

As you can see in the sequence above, in the time it took to build the apartments, the arcade business (on the right) changed the paintwork on their facade, and on the left, Coco opened and the wine shop beside it closed. Today, it looks like all of the apartments have been bought and are lived in (at least at the weekend). I went for a look around them when they went on sale in 2010 and while they are well enough appointed inside, the key feature is the amazing view of Galway Bay afforded by the ceiling to floor glass frontage.

Since the last picture was taken, it looks like all of the apartments are occupied – however, the commercial property on the ground floor is unoccupied [there was a convenience store there for a short while].

Gulls Aloud

John Smyth — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 00:45:05 +0000

I was standing on Salthill Promenade just after sunrise, sipping a cappuccino, 2 weekends ago when I noticed a bit of a fuss at the water’s edge, just below where I was standing. A family of herring gulls were on the shore, and the juvenile [the mottled brown one in the picture above] was making a lot of noise. One of the parents had just caught a starfish and junior was hoping to get some. When the bird was younger, its parents would have fed it by regurgitating recently caught food and the bird had learned that pecking at a parent’s beak might produce a meal. Not any more.

The juvenile harried, wheedled and screeched, trying to get a bite at the starfish in the other gull’s mouth but didn’t get a sniff of it (it would have got an even more aggressive response if it had approached a gull that it wasn’t related to). It had to watch while the parent swallowed the starfish whole, which required quite a bit of gulping and more than a few mouthfuls of seawater to digest what must have been a prickly meal.

The Final Frontier

John Smyth — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 23:39:50 +0000

Ok, so it’s not the captain’s chair from Star Trek’s Enterprise, but if you want to explore the Galaxy, a fold-up chair on the beach in Salthill isn’t a bad way to start (and a bit cheaper than the Hubble telescope). To the right is the diving board at the end of Salthill Prom, and just above the chair is the outline of the Milky Way, just about visible over the glare of the streetlights from the Prom.

Even Trashcans get the Blues

John Smyth — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 23:15:29 +0000

The facial expression on the trashcan [one of a series along Salthill Promenade] seems to sum up the mood on a wet and windy August day last week.