Ushered upwards by labourers clinging to scaffolds or dangling in harnesses, they are feats of engineering, imagination and bravery, built at great financial and human cost. Waves frequently confiscated tools, dismantled masonry and swept workmen away. Although shaped to resist the sea, these unique buildings share something of its mystery and power, and bear witness to the history of our maritime past.
Offshore lighthouses are not like ordinary lighthouses. Over a period spanning four centuries, with Britain’s booming sea trade dogged by shipwrecks and drownings, we undertook to build in the sea itself. Beyond the apparent finality of Britain and Ireland’s coastlines these 170-foot high towers still stand today, raised perilously on underwater reefs and rising mirage-like out of the water. Although no longer inhabited, their chambers still bear signs of the people who once lived in them. But apart from discreet mapping, or the occasional glimpse from a distant ferry, the existence of these isolated sentinels remains unknown to most.
Ahead of his event at Stanfords on Tuesday 16th October, the author of Seashaken Houses: A Lighthouse History from Eddystone to Fastnet, Tom Nancollas takes us to some of the most emblematic surviving offshore lighthouses.
Eddystone
Two versions exist of this lighthouse, one on land, the other in the sea. Thirteen miles out into the English Channel, a mighty lighthouse tower of 1882 built by the legendary Douglass family marks a long-notorious reef on the approach to Plymouth harbour. It happens to be the fourth tower to be built on this reef, preceded by a family of pioneering towers that tells a lighthouse history in microcosm. Arguably the most important of these, John Smeaton’s third Eddystone lighthouse of 1759, can be visited today on Plymouth Hoe, having been rebuilt there as a monument to its creator.
Bell Rock
For over 200 years this tower has shone a light off the east coast of Scotland. Built in 1811 by Robert, the first of the Stevenson dynasty of lighthouse engineers, it is a symbol of Scotland at the peak of its powers – perspicacious, rational, urbane, mercurial – and those qualities are to be found in the lighthouse itself. More than any other tower it expresses the ambassadorial and protective roles lighthouses have in a nation’s story.
Longstone
The beautiful Farne Islands off the Northumbrian coast are the sort to generate folklore. They have tantalising associations with monks and hermits. And later, in the 1820s, when sea-trade bustled up and down this coastline, a lighthouse was built on the Longstone, the outermost of the islands. Legendarily, in 1838, a daring rescue of nine people from the shipwrecked Forfarshire was mounted by the lighthouse keeper, William Darling, and his 22-year-old daughter Grace.
Longstone Island can be found on OS Explorer 340
Godrevy
Built in 1859, this is a lighthouse of the mind. This enigmatic presence just off St Ives’ Bay inspired Virginia Woolf’s modernist masterpiece To The Lighthouse (1927). In this insightful work, she beautifully conveys the unique duality of a lighthouse – by day a tower, by night a light – and writes compellingly of the way the faraway beam cast light not just over the raging sea but into the dark rooms of the houses on the shore.
Godrevy Island can be found on OS Explorer 102
Fastnet
Eight miles due south of the Cork coast stands the Fastnet, known as Ireland’s teardrop because it was the last thing Irish emigrants saw as their ships slid out of the eastern ports for America. Conversely, it was a more jubilant prospect for those coming the other way, being the first thing encountered by Ireland- and Britain-bound American shipping after the void of the ocean. This lighthouse of 1904 is the youngest of the towers and has the flawlessness of a design worked-out to perfection. Between it and America there is nothing except breeze and water, and it looks gallantly into huge seas.
Seashaken Houses: A Lighthouse History from Eddystone to Fastnet £16.99
Tom Nancollas will be at Stanfords on Tuesday 16th October talking about his new book. For more details and tickets see here.