Lighthouse

From: Economist

The Fastnet Rock is about as rugged as they come. Its Irish name, An Charraig Aonair, means “The Rock that Stands Alone”. Its name in Old Norse, Hvastann-ey, stood for “Sharp-Toothed Island”. The rough waters round about claimed numerous lives and were sung about in 17th-century laments. But it was considered mysterious as well as dangerous. Legend had it that on the summer equinox, it would set sail and visit its neighbours; Bull, Cow, Calf and Heifer Rocks. For centuries it was part of the rich fishing grounds of West Cork’s O’Driscoll clan, and the locals would not have been averse to the odd shipwreck giving them an opportunity for plunder. “Please God, send us a ship,” was long a private prayer along the coast, according to one of Fastnet’s keepers brought up near Crookhaven, the nearest port.

Douglass’s method of building was one invented by his father, Nicholas, on another lighthouse in the 1860s (and used long afterwards in British lighthouses). Concrete blocks were dovetailed into those around it, and cemented into those above and below, like a Chinese puzzle, so that it was impossible to remove any one stone without removing those above it. “This system of dovetail joggles absolutely bonds the entire structure into a virtual monolith,” wrote Scott. The contract to supply the granite was won by Messrs John Freeman and Sons of Penrhyn, Cornwall. In 1897 its workers started chiselling away at 2,074 stones, each weighing from 1.7 to 3 tons to create the puzzle.

Fastnet was peculiar, he says, as he points to a picture of the lighthouse on his sitting-room wall. It may look like Alcatraz on the outside, but inside time never drags. Perhaps that is because of the weight of green and white water that surrounds one; it never stops churning. In stormy winter weather, the “big seas would come sailing up over the entire building like the field of horses in the Grand National,” as one former Fastnet keeper put it. Sometimes, there were almost disastrous consequences; Mr O’Driscoll remembers a storm in 1985 when a wave reached as high as the light and came crashing through the glass, overturning the vat of mercury and sending the poisonous liquid pouring down the stairs. He doubts the tower would have withstood another wallop as great as that, but it never came. Suddenly, there was a great calmness. There were moments of deep sadness, too. Missing children’s birthdays, for example, because the weather turned and the ship could not get close enough to the rock to take him ashore. What do you do at those times? “There’s nothing you can do,” he says. “You slowly climb back upstairs and bake more bread.”