Qualla: Old Lower Lighthouse

Old Lower Lighthouse: Introduction

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Steve Daniels, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 1789, a Weymouth builder named William Johns set up scaffolding on a low ledge at the southern tip of Portland and demolished a perfectly serviceable seventy-three-year-old lighthouse. He was rebuilding it for one reason: an inventor named Thomas Rogers had been experimenting with glass lenses set into lighthouse windows, and Trinity House had decided to try them here. The lenses Rogers installed worked. They were the first time anyone, anywhere, had used glass optics to focus a working lighthouse beam. They didn't last more than a few years - but they began something that every lighthouse in the world would eventually adopt.

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Image: Steve Daniels | CC BY-SA 2.0

Old Lower Lighthouse: A Petition Won at Last

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Raimond Spekking, CC BY-SA 4.0. Sailors had been begging Trinity House for lights at Portland Bill since the late seventeenth century, and Trinity House had been refusing them. The coast was famously dangerous - the Shambles sandbank, the tidal race, the long line of Chesil Beach that swallowed ships in storms ...

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Image: Raimond Spekking | CC BY-SA 4.0

Old Lower Lighthouse: The First Lenses

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Raimond Spekking, CC BY-SA 4.0. By 1789 the Lower Lighthouse needed rebuilding, and Trinity House saw a chance to experiment. Thomas Rogers had been working with what would later be called dioptric optics - lenses ground to focus a divergent flame into a tight, directional beam - and the Lower was made his test...

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Image: Raimond Spekking | CC BY-SA 4.0

Old Lower Lighthouse: Improvement and Obsolescence

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jim Champion from Southampton, UK, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 1824 Trinity House upgraded both lights again: the Higher was given a revolving mechanism while the Lower stayed fixed but considerably brighter. In 1869 both towers were rebuilt once more, this time each fitted with a large first-order fixed optic designed by the engineer Jam...

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Image: Jim Champion from Southampton, UK | CC BY-SA 2.0

Old Lower Lighthouse: Tea Gardens and Empty Years

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ajsmith141, CC BY-SA 3.0. During the First World War, the disused lighthouse housed the Longstone Ope Tea Gardens - the kind of seaside enterprise that briefly thrived along every English coast before the war narrowed leisure considerably. The building also served as a family home in this period. After th...

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Image: Ajsmith141 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Old Lower Lighthouse: A Bird Observatory

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris Downer, CC BY-SA 2.0. In the 1950s a small group of ornithologists started visiting Portland to study the migrating birds that funnel down the headland each spring and autumn. They needed somewhere to base themselves. Helen Brotherton and her family stepped in: she purchased the lighthouse and her fam...

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Image: Chris Downer | CC BY-SA 2.0