Ireland Island, Bermuda

Following the American War of Independence, which left Bermuda the only British territory between Nova Scotia and the West Indies, the Royal Navy bought the island to use for a lighthouse and dockyard.

A dozen years were spent surveying Bermuda's encompassing reef for a channel sufficient to enable ships of burthen to reach Ireland Island and the Great Sound.

As Bermuda's porous limestone did not allow for a conventional drydock, a series of floating dry docks were also moored to the wharf inside the cambers from the 1860s.

The Commissioner's House at the highest point atop The Keep (a fortress within the fortified North Yard) on the northern point of the island was home to a Royal Navy Wireless Station from 1939 to 1949 (another had been located since the First World War at Daniel's Head on Somerset Island, and was taken over by the Royal Canadian Navy from the 1960s 'til 1995 as CFS Bermuda, a transmitter location).

Other than HMS Malabar and the maritime museum, Ireland Island was largely deserted after the 1950s, and many of the former naval buildings were becoming derelict by the 1980s when the colonial government formed a quango named the West End Development Company to attempt to draw businesses and visitors to the area.

The presence of most of Bermuda's tourism visitors there has turned the Royal Naval Dockyard into a busy pleasure town, albeit few people actually reside on Ireland Island.