On old maps you will find Red Island called Haven Island. Now the word haven, it is interesting to note, is both Danish and Norwegian for harbour.  So it means simply an island with a harbour.  The designation Red Island is firmly established at least since the mid 19th. century, for we have in the archives a letter from Francis Gowan dated 1858 and he gives his address as Red Island.

Morris's Yard likewise has a claim to remembrance for it was once a hive of industry.  Schooners and smacks were built there and ships salvaged after shipwreck were repaired there.  A deep trench was dug on the South Strand to enable ships to be launched.  But when I was young its glory had already departed.  I can only recall great piles of scrap iron which found a ready market after the outbreak of World War 1, the iron being a necessary component of shells to kill or maim.

What is really the east strand we call the South Strand - not out of perverseness as you might imagine, but rather because, as there is a north there must be a south.

Other names that shouldn't be overlooked are: The Wildcat Lane (in Mourne View), Hart's Hill, The Kybe, Shallock Hill, The Mill Pond, Gaveney's Gap, Eevers' Lane or Ivor's Lane.

Paddy Halpin SHS 1980

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In the early part of the 19th Century before the National School system came into being there were two hedge schools in the town, one in the Hoar Rock and one in the Chapel Lane. My grandfather went to one of them. One of these hedge school thechers was a hunchback named Malone and The Rhymer Carroll, a local character addressed him in doggerel verse as follows:-
"The mighty hump you bear up
composed of skin and bone
Come learn from me the rule of three
Humpy Joe Malone".

There was in Skerries at this time a thatcher and handyman nicknamed Spandau and while thatching on one occasion Carroll had this to say to him:-
"Now John Spandau put on more straw
And whack it well and pound it
Or the frosty dew t'will penetrate through
And your inmates they'll be drownded".

Again one day when Carroll had to call the same man to do some work for a local clergyman he called out this doggerel:-
"Get up Spandau
No longer shall you lie
This very day you'll make the hay
For the Reverend Mr. Tighe".