A day in the life of a lighthouse keeper6/11/2023 ![]() Recently, I was asked what prompted this interest. It wasn’t until my 20s that the fascination clicked. I had visited a few land lights as a child and probably professed myself bored. ![]() It seemed a miracle it could stay standing.īefore I started researching my book, I knew nothing, really, about lighthouses. Rocks smashed the base, clunking and groaning. During a storm, the whole tower would quiver as if caught in an electrical current. Inside, it was stuffy and dark, thick with smells of sweat and tobacco and burned bacon, shutters closed in heavy weather, double windows fastened against waves that could chuck salt-spray 85ft into the air, smacking the panes while you’re drinking your tea. Rooms piled one on top of the other, a couple of strides across and that’s it, no way out, nowhere else to go. Before then, three men lived out there on that distant, hostile post for two months at a stretch.Īll they had was each other and the sea. Today, every lighthouse in the UK is automated: the last to go electric was in 1998. Now peer further, deep into the haze, and on a clear day you might pick out the matchstick vertical of the notorious Wolf Rock, eight nautical miles out, so called because of the howling sound the wind makes as it tunnels between the rocks. Stand at Land’s End and you’ll see the Longships – not too far, only a mile away. ![]() Tower lighthouses exist like mirages on the horizon.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |