Lost below the Lighthouse

A cliff top adventure | Lost wrecks | Life as a lighthouse keeper

Sometimes I need the ocean, a wild blue grey stretch of water, towering cliffs, wind and salt and the huge all encompassing reach of all that sea. I have been spinning my wheels recently, finding it hard to settle into new creative work while I am in a waiting period, my novel out of my hands. And so I take myself on an adventure; I take myself to the sea.

I park at the white cliffs and make my way out, along the very top. The day is fresh and clear and France is a bright white line on the horizon: the roofs of Calais are a jagged collection of building blocks just across the azure water. Swimming across does not, today, seem ridiculous.

I follow the dip and swell of the path as it twists around the edge of the chalk. These huge crumbling white walls, dusty, flaking, somehow still standing after all this time, have been an iconic part of our landscape - the border, the signal of home and freedom, the edge of a war. Today the water is striped indigo to turquoise and the white chalk shines against it, a stark and glorious contrast.

It is the lighthouse I have come for. South foreland lighthouse, marking one end of the Goodwin Sands, a treacherous passage that stretches ten miles along the coast to Broadstairs and the still operational North Foreland lighthouse. South Foreland appears before long, a squat white crenellated tower on the edge. It is not built high for a lighthouse - it doesn’t need to be. The cliffs hefe hold us 300ft above sea level. The white washed tower is edged in turquoise green, the window panes the light would shine out from were it lit reflect the sky, the dotted puffs of cloud against burgeoning blue.

Inside, the lighthouses rooms are small, circular of course. The stairs have plaques on the front of them; lighthouse keepers only. There is a round office with a table set beneath a window that looks out onto ferry boats, carving the ocean with their white rippling wakes. Charts are laid out on the table, a grey jumper over the back of the chair, as if someone could have just got up. What a different life it would be, here, on the edge of the land. Families down in the cottages below - because South Foreland is on the mainland, families would stay together, grow vegetables on the cliff tops. For the lighthouses out at sea, only the keeper would go out to the light; his family would stay behind in cottages on the land, separated for months by steel blue water. What a life it must have been, so different to what so many of us know, so different to anything now.  Lighthouses are of course fully automated these days.

Then, there would have been three keepers, two on shift overnight. A gas lamp with eight wicks burning bright, rotating lenses turning with the mechanism of a grandfather clock, wound by hand by the keepers every few hours. Each light with its own distinct pattern, marked on every navigation chart. South Foreland; three flashes, pause, three flashes.

There was another lighthouse, just a skeleton now, below this one. It’s rusted frame still stands in the very edge: before long the cliffs will crumble at the shin of the wind and weather and it will tumble into the ocean below. There is no preventing it. Once, ships in the channel would line these two lights up, the one above, the one below, and they would know they were safe of the treacherous Goodwin Sands, an area that has claimed over 1000 ships in the last 500 years. The National Trust who run the lighthouse estimate the number is higher than that, possibly as high as 2000, but there are no records. The treacherous sands have a band of london clay underneath; as the tides rise and fall they act like quicksand. The boats break up, the sand ducks then down, and then they are gone, traceless, invisible to the divers who go searching for signs of this giant ship graveyard. But there is nothing to see; all is empty, only wrinkled sand remaining where once all these ships - and lives - were lost. Lost below the beam of this light.

We go up, past the huge light, the rotating glass that controls the beam. Refracted light dances around the wall as it moves. The platform which bears the light housing - the lenses and filled in panels which rotate to give the flash pattern - is heavy as a car, yet floats in led and turns so smoothly it can be moved with a single finger. We go out, onto the balcony, and all the land and all the sea is splayed around us. The wind has a new autumn bite to it and I look out, across the ocean, and think of all the stories we have told through the years, of ships lost at sea, of ghosts and merfolk and sea monsters. We know so little, really, of the ocean, even now. It’s vastness calls to us, questions us, and in return we populate it with all manner of stories. Stories we use to explain the unexplainable, to try and understand the unknown.