The lighthouse was authorised by an Act of Parliament of 1776 - 16 Geo. 3, c. 61 - and built by a trust of the Mayor, Recorder, and Aldermen of Chester to warn shipping entering the channel between the Dee and Mersey estuaries. At the time, Chester was still hoping to remain a working port, even as the Dee silted up year by year and traffic shifted to Liverpool. The Point of Ayr marked the headland between the two estuaries - the most northerly point of Flintshire and of mainland Wales - and ships approaching either river had to identify the headland correctly to make safe entry. The 1776 brick tower stood roughly sixty feet tall, painted white, with a coal-fired light that burned at the lantern level. By the mid nineteenth century it had been fitted with the standard reflector and lamp system of the era.

By the 1830s, the original Point of Ayr light no longer marked the best position for warning ships off the actual sandbanks. The Liverpool authorities replaced it with a pile light - a screw-pile structure built on iron piles driven into the seabed offshore - which could be placed precisely where the danger lay. The brick tower at Talacre was decommissioned in 1844. The pile light continued in service for several more decades before its own replacement by buoys and modern aids. The old tower never resumed lighting duty. It became, in the language of British heritage, a redundant lighthouse - useful only as a landmark, picturesque from any angle, and inherited by a succession of private owners through the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In 2010 the then owner, James McAllister, applied for planning permission to erect what he called a 'serious art installation' on the gallery of the disused lighthouse - a seven-foot stainless-steel figure of a lighthouse keeper, designed by local artist Angela Smith. The application was prompted by the lighthouse's reputation as a haunted site - several alleged ghost sightings on the gallery had been reported in the local press. The figure was approved for a three-year display period. For three years a steel sentinel stood watching from the gallery while photographers and tourists climbed the dune to look up at it. Permission was not renewed at the end of the period, and the sculpture was relocated. The base of the lighthouse, meanwhile, was damaged in storms in 2007 - a hole opened in the masonry and the metal access steps were torn loose. Repairs were funded by the owners of the local caravan park.

The 1776 lighthouse made an unlikely television debut in 2011, appearing in the background of a Dulux paint commercial marking the fiftieth anniversary of the company's Old English Sheepdog mascot. The shot lined up the dog on the beach with the white tower behind, the surf gently breaking around it, and the brand colours of cream and white perfectly composed against the morning light at Talacre. The lighthouse was sold the following year for £90,000 with two acres of land - listed at £100,000 by the previous owner. The buyers were a private couple who continue to own the building and the land around it. The lighthouse is Grade II listed, which limits external alterations but otherwise leaves the structure in private hands.

What sets the Talacre lighthouse apart from other coastal towers is its setting. Most lighthouses stand on rock - granite headlands, basalt islands, reefs at the entrance to harbours. Point of Ayr stands on shifting sand. The dunes around it migrate season by season, blown inland in some years and rebuilt by storm-driven sand in others. The high-water mark moves; the inter-tidal flats expand and contract. The lighthouse has survived 250 years on this surface in part because the foundations were built deeper than the apparent base suggests, and in part because the local geology of the headland has remained, against all probability, broadly stable. Visit at sunset, when the tide is out and the wet sand reflects the sky, and the lighthouse appears to be standing on a pink-orange mirror that runs all the way to the horizon. It does not look real. It is.