To the lighthouse
Built to warn mariners off the jagged peril of Britain’s coast, the lantern-topped Sentinels of the Sea are irresistible to walkers...
Lantern-topped Sentinels of the Sea, irresistible to walkers...
LIGHTHOUSES HAVE ALWAYS been romantic. Lovers of the world’s wild places have never objected to the presence of these lonely sentinels on remote cliffs or in secluded bays. Rather than impressing the stamp of humanity’s dominance on nature, lighthouses evoke human frailty and isolation in the face of the elemental strength of the ocean and the winds.
The building of a lighthouse was often triggered by a maritime disaster, some shipwreck so awful in its material or human loss that the authorities would be goaded into exploring the possibility of installing a light in an apparently impossible location exposed to the extremes of wind and wave. Bell Rock off east Scotland had long been known as a mortal hazard to shipping before the British warship HMS York struck the reef in January 1804 and sank with the loss of all 491 crew on board. Described by engineer Robert Stevenson as a ‘fatal catastrophe of which history affords few examples’, this shipwreck loosened public purse strings, thereby providing Stevenson with the funds to proceed with building the renowned Bell Rock light (1811).
It’s hard for us today to imagine how dark the night must once have been. In the 18th century, when the modern era of lighthouse building got under way, even the largest cities were sparsely lit. The few beacons for sailors maintained on towers and headland were usually braziers in which wood or coal was burnt, consuming large quantities of fuel and useless in bad weather.
The state of marine illumination had not improved notably by the time John Smeaton completed his groundbreaking work on the Eddystone lighthouse on a rock off Cornwall’s Rame Head in 1759. The most advanced illumination Smeaton could find to place in its lantern was a chandelier of twenty-four candles.
Swiss inventor Aime Argand is credited with developing the lamp that first revolutionized marine lights. Developed in the 1780s, his Argand lamp had a wick shaped like a hollow cylinder, enclosed in a glass chimney. It produced a light four times brighter than any previous oil lamp and, when it first appeared, amazed everyone who saw it. By the later 19th century, some lights of extraordinary power were being deployed in key locations. The Galley Head lighthouse in County Cork, Ireland, first lit in 1878, had a coal gas light delivering around a million candlepower, visible over 16 nautical miles away.
Lighthouse keepers were heroes
of the Victorian era, celebrated for their humble dutiful devotion to a humanitarian task, the hermit-like simplicity and solitude of their lives. Refined urbanites, tired of the complexities of city living, romanticized the keepers’ nightly vigil among the wind and waves, their meditative contemplation of nature interrupted by a seabird striking the glass of the lantern or an occasional dramatic rescue of shipwrecked mariners. But this pleasing picture didn’t come close to the reality of a hard and monotonous way of life.
It was in the middle of the 19th century when US author Henry Longfellow wrote his acclaimed poem The Lighthouse, which hymns the light for its permanence: ‘Steadfast, serene, immovable, the same, Year after year through all the silent night, Burns on forevermore that quenchless flam, Shines on the inextinguishable light’. But sadly, history shows that nothing is ‘immovable, the same’, nothing is ‘forevermore’. A hundred and fifty years after Longfellow wrote his poem, thousands of lighthouses across the world had been decommissioned, many had been demolished, and those that still functioned had been transformed into automatic beacons, deprived of the vigilant human presence that once gave them a human soul.
Lighthouses seem well on their way to joining castles and abbeys as much-loved but non-utilitarian historic features of the landscape. And, like castles and abbeys, it’s quite possible that many will eventually survive only as romantic ruins. Yet a lighthouse without its light is a form without a function. It would be sad if future generations were never to see again, as Longfellow saw, how ‘...as the evening darkens, lo! how bright, Through the deep purple of the twilight aire, Beams forth the sudden radiance of its light, With strange, unearthly splendor in the glare!’