Night a corpse knocked on a lighthouse window

ONE day in the early 19th century, at Smalls Rock lighthouse off the coast of Wales, a lighthouse keeper suddenly died. His fellow keeper knew that the body would soon start to smell, but if he buried it at sea, people might suspect him of murder. So he lashed the corpse to the outside of the lighthouse. Unfortunately, the improvised coffin broke open, allowing the dead man’s arm to fall down and start banging against the window, as if begging to come in. When colleagues from the mainland arrived a week later, they found the surviving keeper had been sent stark raving mad. Stories such as this are par for the watery course in Tom Nancollas’s trip around Britain’s rock lighthouses. It’s a book to make you feel safe on a cold winter’s night. Pour yourself a glass of something warming, sit back and feel thankful you’re not in one of the bizarre structures.

Twenty of them survive, sitting on reefs that lie off the coast, guiding ships away from the dangerous rocks lurking beneath the waves.

The first rock lighthouse was Eddystone, 13 miles off Plymouth, in 1698. It was designed by Henry Winstanley, who was captured by the French (England’s enemy at the time) during construction, but when Louis XIV learned that Winstanley was building a lighthouse, he released him, saying he was ‘at war with England, not humanity’.

So confident was Winstanley of his tower’s strength that he expressed a desire to be in it during the worst storm possible. He got his chance in 1703, with a gale that drove windmills on the mainland so hard their sails burst into flames.

Sadly, out on the rock, the lighthouse came crashing down, killing Winstanley and everyone else in it.

A replacement tower burned down in 1755. During the blaze, a 94-yearold keeper looked up, open-mouthed, only to swallow a falling globule of molten lead. He died 12 days later. The globule is now in the National Museum of Scotland.

There was some magnificent innovation as the lighthouse build-

ers battled against nature. John Smeaton, the designer of the third Eddystone tower, took inspiration from an oak tree (its wide base giving a low centre of gravity) and a London pavement, whose dovetailed stones locked together with great force.

Meanwhile, at Bell Rock, 11 miles off Arbroath in Scotland, the lighthouse was constructed using the world’s first-ever counter-balance tower crane. These are the type you see helping to build skyscrapers, with weights on the opposite arm from the one carrying the load.

The lanterns themselves also underwent astonishing improvement. Initially, they were just candles. Then oil lamps came along, with lenses and mirrors cunningly positioned to reflect the beam out to sea.

By the early 19th century, Bell Rock’s light could be seen 35 miles away. By the end of the century, some beams shone with a brightness equivalent to 750,000 candles.

Mind you, the keepers at Longships lighthouse off Land’s End did their best to jeopardise this success —– they held a barbecue in the lantern room, thereby darkening the reflectors with smoke and fat.

Danger and oddity are never far away in this book. As Nancollas says, rock lighthouses are among the few buildings ‘designed expressly to repel, to emphatically not be seen at close quarters’. When he does visit them, he finds it unnerving to be (in effect) out at sea, but not moving.

The keepers who lived in the lighthouses often went months at a time without walking more than 12ft (a tower’s typical diameter) in a straight line. Even their beds curved with the walls, earning the nickname ‘banana bunks’. These days, the lighthouses are all automated, but maintenance visits are still sometimes necessary.

Nancollas accompanies an engineer to Fastnet, where the boiler needs fixing — a job so complicated it takes five days.

He brings James Joyce’s Ulysses to while away the hours but, even in these extreme conditions, he can’t be bothered to persevere with the famously impenetrable book.

Instead, he marvels at the revolving lantern, a mechanism that weighs six tons, but which, because it’s housed in a trough of frictionless mercury, can be moved with your little finger.

Fastnet sits well in this book of unsettling and sorrowful tales. The rock was the last bit of their home country seen by those emigrating to America. Because of this, it became known as ‘Ireland’s Teardrop’.