these images of mussel dredging in the 1990s. Mussels were originally used as a food source in the Mornington-Baltray areas and only became a commercial fishery about 1902–1903. The season ran over the winter from October to April and raking took place about two hours before and after low tide. The collected mussels then were shovelled through a sieve to remove stones and seaweed and bagged in Hessian sacks which were sent to a processing factory in Wexford. Most were afterwards packed and exported to France. The point of land where the Boyne turns South-East before entering the sea is known locally as The Crook or Crooke, and in the nineteenth century, at the Maiden Tower a pool called the Long Reach, extending a quarter of a mile inland, was where vessels could lie at low water. A fish-meal factory was set up at the Crooke in 1968 by a Scottish concern with support from Bord Iascaigh Mhara to process fish from the herring industry out of Clogherhead and Skerries. Its construction impinged on the customary right of fishermen to draw their boats up at that point. It wound up in the late-1970s following several years of heavy fishing by vessels which led to Herring stocks in the Irish Sea collapsing. The private jetty continued to be regularly used by fishing boats from Clogherhead to moor up and the company was finally liquidated in 2003. The Irish Government bought the jetty and adjoining lands in 2001 for £170,000 to retain its use as a licensed location to land explosives in commercial quantities, chiefly for local quarrying enterprises, and munitions. Drogheda Port advanced plans to develop the mouth of the Boyne around the tower as a modern deepwater port facility in the late 1990s but the inability to locate the owner of the old boathouse there delayed the project. A reservation strip for a road corridor had already been laid into the County Meath development plan of the area which disallowed residential building along the proposed route from the Dublin Road. There was local opposition to the project until the lands were designated as the Boyne Estuary (1996) and Boyne Coast and Estuary SACs (Special Areas of Conservation) by Dúchas – The Heritage Service and this put paid to the plans. However initial dredging of the river channel took place in 1999–2000, and after renewed dredging in the channel of the