The Calf of Man already had lighthouses — two of them, working in tandem so that a passing ship could line them up and know its position. But the trouble with two paired lights on a high island is fog. As early as 1866 mariners reported that one or both Calf lights were regularly obscured, breaking the transit and leaving ships to guess at the position of Chicken Rock itself, which lay directly in the shipping lanes between Ireland and the Isle of Man. Approval to build a rock light came in 1868. David and Thomas Stevenson were already working on the similarly fearsome Dubh Artach light off the west of Scotland, and the Chickens drew on the same engineering philosophy: tapered granite blocks, dovetailed into one another and into the rock, designed to shed the weight of a North Atlantic sea. Construction finished in December 1874 at a total cost of £64,559. The first official lighting was 1 January 1875 — a New Year's Day light, a fitting beginning.

Rock-station postings were the loneliest jobs in the British lighthouse service. The Chickens kept a crew of three at a time. There was no garden, no walk, no neighbour. In storms the relief boat from Port St Mary could not always get out, and a fortnight on the rock might stretch into a month. In January 1960 the Isle of Man Weekly Times reported that keepers Charles Roberts and Leslie Anderson had been marooned through Christmas and New Year because of persistent gales; the relief did not reach them until they were three weeks overdue. They had spent Christmas Day on the tower without their Christmas dinner. Anyone who has ever read a Robert Louis Stevenson novel and wondered where the temperament for an Ebenezer Balfour or an Alan Breck might come from — this is the kind of work the family had been doing for three generations.

Eleven months after the marooning, on 23 December 1960, fire broke out inside the lighthouse. Three keepers were on duty. One was badly burned. The Port St Mary RNLI lifeboat fought its way out through a winter sea and brought all three off the rock. Damage to the interior was severe. The Northern Lighthouse Board repaired the tower, but the decision was made not to staff it again: the new technology was reliable enough, and a place that had nearly killed three men on a December night was a hard place to ask anyone to come back to. The Chickens was automated in 1961, the keepers' quarters stripped out, and the rock became, finally, what it had always looked like from a distance — a lighthouse with no one inside.

Chicken Rock Lighthouse is still lit. The Northern Lighthouse Board, which has operated it for more than a century and a half, maintains the optic by helicopter visits to the top of the tower. From the cliffs of the Calf of Man a visitor with binoculars can pick out the gallery, the lantern room, the slim taper of granite climbing out of white water. In rough weather the spray climbs nearly to the lantern — a reminder of why the Stevensons built what they built, and why the men who tended the light considered three uninterrupted weeks on the rock a normal tour. The Christmas of 1959–60 has a memorial of its own: a 1940s film about the lighthouse and its keepers survives, and a Manx Museum entry titled simply Chickens Men Get Off the Rock. The men got off. The light stayed on.