Portland Bill lighthouse is quite a significant lighthouse. It’s the 7th tallest in England and the 5th tallest still in operation – although, like all its siblings, it’s automated from Trinity House’s control room in Harwich. It’s the second tallest on shore, and while at 41m, it ties for top place in the tallest that can be visited and climbed by ordinary tourists like me, its rival is Dungeness Old Lighthouse, which was decommissioned in 1960. So if you want to climb an operating lighthouse in England, this is the tallest.
I went because I’m working on a badge. It’s Girlguiding South West’s Fastnet Challenge 2015 badge, which I remember the Guides next door doing in… Well, 2015. It’s a pretty badge and GGSWE still have a few in stock at reduced prices five years later. The Fastnet Race is a biannual yacht race, from the Isle of Wight out to the lighthouse on Fastnet Rock off the south of Ireland and back to Plymouth, although it’ll be back to Cherbourg as of next year because of better sailing and crowd infrastructure. Thus the badge is themed around the sea and the ports and sailing. It’s split into six parts, which they call “ports”, even though three of them are “training”, “on board” and “Fastnet Rocks”. Part 5, Fastnet, suggestion 2 is “visit a lighthouse and if possible, climb to the light at the top”. So I did.
I was booked on the 11am tour and there were four of us, plus our guide. We had masks on and Chris, the guide, had a face shield, plus a Bluetooth speaker in a little ball hanging around his neck. COVID-wise, we could distance very easily on the 153 steps but the floors got progressively smaller and we’d have been on top of each other by the time we got to the light if there had been any more of us.
First, we saw the original prism lamp. It’s a huge thing – so big that when the lighthouse was built, it was craned up in pieces and the top chamber built around it. That perfect glass needs to be kept spotless – Chris said the majority of a keeper’s time would have been spent cleaning and polishing, although admittedly partly for something to do during a long lonely shift – and I can only imagine how much cleaning would be needed for it after having something built around it right next to the sea.
That old light could reach 25 nautical miles and the diaphone air-powered foghorn 30 miles. Both have now been replaced with modern versions. The new LED light only reaches 18 miles and the digital foghorn is delicate enough to incur Chris’s wrath for being “pathetic”. Good reason, though. In the event of fog, any vessel 30 miles offshore is going to be something big with sophisticated navigation equipment that doesn’t need a foghorn to keep it off the rocks. The horn only has to reach smaller vessels that won’t be so far out in the Channel and won’t have that kind of equipment.
And off we went. I don’t know how many steps it is to the 1st floor but it’s plenty. I meant to climb without touching the handrail because Plague but with ten steps I realised it wasn’t going to be possible. I’d expected something in my calves to give up first so I was quite surprised when it was my knees that protested, very loudly. I made it to the landing half-dead. Now, climbing is one thing. Climbing in a mask is another. On the one hand, no one else can see your mouth gasping open as you try frantically to get your breath. I guess it works a little like breathing into a paper bag, in that it’ll feed you back a certain amount of carbon dioxide you shouldn’t get if you were breathing openly. The mask flapped – I could feel it being sucked in and blown out as I stood on the 1st floor, listening to tales of foghorns over my own panting. And by the way, if I can climb a lighthouse in a mask and manage not to suffocate, you can survive wearing one in the supermarket. My mask was the one I made in the How to Make a Mask post from the other day, a nautical themed one with red and blue sea creatures on it. When I planned to have “a mask for all occasions”, I hadn’t imagined having a suitably nautical one for a lighthouse climb.
The first floor, by the way, houses all the electronics and batteries and backups for remote-operating the old prism lamp, plus the old air tanks for blasting the old foghorn. There’s also a big steel box containing the electronics for the new LED lamp but there’s no angle where you can get everything in on a floor this confined.
The next set of stairs was a bit shorter, plus I paused a couple of times to look out of windows and thus arrived at the second floor less exhausted. This was the operating room, where working keepers spent most of their time. It’s a bit bare now but it once had an Aga, both for cooking and presumably warmth, a big chest of charts and equipment, a chair and table and then the centre of the room is occupied by a big tube, which contained the pendulum, which turns the light every twenty seconds using the same clockwork mechanism that turns the hands in a longcase clock. The light itself was floating on a vat of liquid mercury, so you could turn the 3.5 ton lamp with a single finger. The new LED light doesn’t need to rotate – it can do it itself.
Here we were introduced to several interesting features. The first was something that looked like a big foot-button on the floor. Actually, it’s a lid which can be removed to leave a hole in the floor about five inches in diameter. There was one downstairs as well. We speculated as to the purpose. Yes, you could shout down through it to your fellow keeper downstairs. Yes, you could drop – or lower, if you were feeling civilised – things down it. But actually, it lines up with holes in the rotating lamp base above our heads and it means you can check whether the light is working without having to climb up. You could also step outside and look up but only if you’re in an onshore lighthouse and I can entirely understand not wanting to go outside in the dark and the cold, especially down by the sea.
Next was the sector light. That’s actually housed downstairs, through wooden doors that weren’t open to us. It’s a smaller red light that shines from halfway up the tower and it illuminates something called the Shambles, which is a huge sandbank not far off shore. At low tide, it can be as little as three feet below the surface of the water. A kayaker or dinghy sailor might skip right over the top without noticing but a large ship would run aground, potentially with catastrophic results. It’s marked on charts and navigation equipment and has a buoy on each end but the sector light is another marker.
The other hazard is the Portland Race. This island is a big slab of limestone strata, tilted south towards the sea. And there are more layers under the water, reaching beyond the Bill. They make it quite shallow but they also produce an oceanic phenomenon whereby the fast-moving tide, constricted by the shallow water caused by the rocks, stirs up some craziness – whirling waters, random waves, showers of debris and a lot of unpleasant conditions you don’t want your small craft getting caught in. I’m not entirely sure how they’re protecting the Race – the sector light might shine on it too.
And now it was time for the main event. We had 10 or 20 more steps to climb, steep enough that you need to use the handholds cut into the treads rather than the rail, and be lectured on “two points of contact at all times” and then we were up in the light chamber.
Now we saw another feature – a rotating CCTV camera is mounted on the tower. Not for the lighthouse’s purposes; this is for the coastguard watch station further up on the hill. They can’t see the shallows immediately off the Bill from there but they own and control this camera, which is their eyes on events down here. It doesn’t stop people getting caught by the Race but it means they can see it.
It was hot up here. I’d accidentally picked a very sunny day and the tall glass dome magnified it. There were two fans sitting up on the light’s platform. The mercury pool is long gone, replaced by ball bearings, but the new LED lamp doesn’t need to be rotated. The back of the dome is painted black so the bright light doesn’t flash back over Portland and its inhabitants and although the old light would be pretty blinding if you were up here when it was on, the LED one is directional and you’d be fine as long as you weren’t standing at eye level with it.
Having admired the view and the compact modern lamp, we descended back to the second floor, where we were presented with badges for our achievement in reaching the top. And now Christ proceeded to terrify us. We were to make our way back down to ground level and we were told that “on the way up, you were concentrating on looking up.” On the way down, we’d be looking down – specifically, we’d be looking at the void that is the inside of the lighthouse on our left. People panic, looking at the void. If you feel panicky, stop, sit down on the steps, you’re not going anyway. Take a few minutes. If you feel yourself starting to go that way, press your right shoulder into the wall, put your left hand on the hand rail and descend staring hard at the wall.
I thought the steep stepladder to the light was the worst bit. Now I started to consider a career as a lighthouse keeper. I could live up here on the second floor, never need to stand on solid ground again. I was terrified of this void that was going to turn my mind inside out.
But a tour guide won’t let tourists move into their lighthouse. I had to go down. And it was fine. The first floor was just a whirl around the stairs away and the second floor took up a surprising amount of the so-called void. I did press one arm into the wall and had the other hand on the rail but that’s an old habit born of my caving days. I hopped and skipped down the stairs. We paused for the rest to catch up and then I hopped and skipped down the second part. This was a longer descent but it did have the sector light’s room wedged in below the floor we’d paused on. At no point did I feel any void looking at me.
At the bottom, one of the staff was polishing the old lamp – this was the point at which it occurred to me that building around it must have been filthy. It’s special glass – very thick, very tough, made in “steps”, which bend the light from top to bottom into a huge parallel concentrated set of beams, and it’s quite yellow. I’d have made it in crystal-clear colourless glass myself but then, I’m obviously not an expert on optics or seafaring or anything relevant to lighthouses.
I finished my day with a walk up the hill to the old Higher Lighthouse and the modern-day coastguard station. Yes, they’re right, from this angle you really can’t see what’s going on around the Bill. On a day like this, that CCTV camera is probably watching the grockles, ready to spring into action if one of them decides a little paddle off the Race is a good idea.
The Higher Lighthouse now has four cottages within its grounds, two available for holiday lets, and both with shared access to the lighthouse and the outdoor pool. It’s a bit beyond my budget (and also, there’s very little need to spend a week there when I can drive down for a couple of hours) but it looks amazing, especially during the summer when you can use the pool. Anyway.
The Old Higher lighthouse isn’t as tall as the new Portland Bill lighthouse – it’s only twelve metres, compared to the 41 that I’d climbed, and the Old Lower light, which I didn’t get to and which is now a bird observatory, is 25m. Their combined job wasn’t to flash a light as far out into the Channel as possible; it was simply to guide passing shipping safely past the Shambles so they didn’t need height. They just needed to coordinate – when you were sailing past, when the two lighthouses aligned, it guided you safely past the Shambles.
One picnic down by the sea, a ten minute stroll along the low fractured cliffs, and my car parking was running out. So I made my way home, to spend the next few days thinking, dreaming, being, lighthouse.