Qualla: Godrevy Lighthouse

Godrevy Lighthouse: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tim Green from Bradford, CC BY 2.0. She watched it from the lawn of Talland House for thirteen summers. From 1882, the year she was born, until 1894 - when she was twelve and her mother only one year from dying - Virginia Stephen spent every August at the house her father had taken on the hill above St Ives, looking out across the bay to a slim white tower on a small granite island. The novel she would write thirty-three years later, in 1927, displaced the geography to the Hebrides. But the lighthouse in To the Lighthouse is Godrevy Lighthouse, and the bay and the family and the sense of summer suspended over time are all Cornwall. Woolf herself was clear about it. The lighthouse was first lit on 1 March 1859. By the time she could see it from her window, it had already been doing its work for twenty-three years.

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Image: Tim Green from Bradford | CC BY 2.0

Godrevy Lighthouse: The Stones

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sarah Charlesworth, CC BY-SA 2.0. Between Godrevy Head and the small island half a kilometre offshore lies a reef called the Stones - a tangle of submerged granite that turns even moderate seas into death. Before the lighthouse, the Stones had been claiming ships for centuries. The disaster that finally forced ac...

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Image: Sarah Charlesworth | CC BY-SA 2.0

Godrevy Lighthouse: Building the Tower

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kernow Skies, CC BY-SA 3.0. A local clergyman, the Rev. J. W. Murray of Hayle, took the cause to Trinity House with a formal petition. In October 1856, Trinity House agreed. By December 1857 James Sutcliffe had been appointed engineer and the architect James Walker contracted to design the tower. Walker, wh...

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Image: Kernow Skies | CC BY-SA 3.0

Godrevy Lighthouse: Two Keepers, One Month Off

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pierre Terre, CC BY-SA 2.0. Two keepers staffed the lighthouse at all times, working two months on and one month off in rotation. The shift change was the worst part of the job. Landing a keeper on Godrevy meant launching a boat at the right state of tide and weather, rowing across the open Atlantic swell, ...

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Image: Pierre Terre | CC BY-SA 2.0

Godrevy Lighthouse: Virginia Woolf's Window

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tim Green from Bradford, CC BY 2.0. Leslie Stephen, Virginia's father, took the lease on Talland House in 1881 partly because it offered the rented summer escape his large family needed and partly, one suspects, because the view from the upper terrace was extraordinary. The lighthouse stood directly out across St I...

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Image: Tim Green from Bradford | CC BY 2.0

Godrevy Lighthouse: Automation and After

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Steve Rowe, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 1933 Trinity House automated the lighthouse, installing a second-order fixed catadioptric lens and an acetylene burner triggered by a sun valve - a device that detected daylight and shut off the gas at dawn. The new light flashed white with a red sector covering the Stones, re...

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Image: Steve Rowe | CC BY-SA 2.0