The siren softens. It is truly beautiful
Extract from The Foghorn’s Lament: The Disappearing Music Of The Coast by Jennifer Lucy Allan
The foghorn blasts.
I don’t hear it only with my ears. I hear it with my whole body – stomach, skin, bone and skull all rattle when the foghorn sounds. The seven full seconds of its sounding feels like much longer, my guts buzz and ears hum – a flood of terrific sound ripples outwards. It is like standing next to a bass bin at a drum and bass night, only with no tops, and no rhythm. I feel the vibrational bliss and rush of physical sound.
I trot down the steps in between blasts to get a better view. From outside the horn building, even just a little distance away, the Sumburgh siren softens to a truly beautiful sound. It has no gruffness or grunt like the Souter Point diaphone, but is a velvety monotone that pours around the buildings on the headland.
Sumburgh has a sevensecond blast, but other foghorns are different, with longer blasts, shorter gaps or with two notes. They were each given their own voice
– a pattern of timed blasts and silences, known as their “character”. Lighthouses already had characters, meaning their lights were made to flash in a unique sequence, in order to make navigational aids distinctive, so you could reorient yourself along the coast if fog or darkness had you temporarily lost.
When a foghorn was installed, a notice to mariners went out, informing them of the sound and its character, and it was added to the Admiralty’s List Of Lights And Fog Signals, which lists, in codes, the timings of the flashes, beeps and blasts of all coastal navigational aids. So, for example, when a foghorn was installed at Toward Point on the Clyde in April 1908, a notice went out stating that a reed fog signal had been installed, that would give one blast of three seconds duration, every 20 seconds.
It’s often said that every foghorn was unique in this regard, each one completely individual, but this is a myth.