William Trench bought the patent to build a lighthouse on the Skerries in 1713 and spent the next twelve years going broke trying to make it work. He paid for the tower himself, lit it with a coal brazier on top in 1717, and watched ships keep wrecking on the rocks around him - including, one terrible night, the boat carrying his own son back to the islands. Trench died in debt in 1725. The Post Office, recognising what he had built, kept his widow on a small pension. Then came the act that changed everything: Parliament confirmed the patent on the light, and the right to collect shipping dues, to his son-in-law Sutton Morgan and to Morgan's heirs forever. Forever turned out to be a very profitable word.
Every commercial ship over five tons entering Liverpool paid one old penny per ton to the Skerries light, whether it had passed within sight of the beam or not. Foreign ships paid double. Liverpool was about to become one of the busiest ports in the world. The Morgan heirs rebuilt the tower around 1759 for £3,000, raised it again in 1778 under Morgan Jones - twice High Sheriff of Cardiganshire - and added an oil-burning lantern under a glass cupola. By the 1830s the Skerries was generating more income for its owners than any other lighthouse in the British Isles. Trinity House had spent decades quietly buying out the few remaining private lights in the country; the Lighthouses Act 1836 finally gave them statutory power to seize the Skerries. The Morgan-Jones family fought every penny of the valuation. When the deal closed in 1841, Trinity House paid them £444,984 - a sum that would equate to tens of millions in today's money, and the largest amount ever paid for a single British lighthouse.
Trinity House handed the engineering job to James Walker, the same architect who designed the elegant black-and-white striped Trwyn Du Lighthouse off Penmon. Walker tapered the tower, replaced the old lantern with a 4.25-metre cast-iron one, and bracketed out a crenellated stone gallery on corbels. The new dioptric light, later upgraded to a lens, shines at 36 metres above mean high tide. The Trinity House coat of arms still sits above what was once the external doorway on the tower's north face. In 1903-4 Walker's successors added a small subsidiary tower for a sector light that warns of specific dangerous reefs nearby. The keeper's quarters - castellated cottages with cobbled yards, symmetrical privies, a small garden and a stone bridge linking two islets - are some of the oldest surviving lighthouse accommodation in Wales. They are now lived in for several months each summer by RSPB wardens watching the tern colony.
The modern light is rated at 1.15 million candelas. It flashes twice every ten seconds and can be seen 22 nautical miles out. In 1987, the last keepers left for good when Trinity House automated the station; the light is now controlled remotely from Holyhead, fourteen miles to the south. On a clear winter night you can stand on Carmel Head, three kilometres away on the Anglesey mainland, and watch the double flash sweep across the dark water exactly where it has swept since George IV was on the throne. The wrecks the light was built to prevent did not stop entirely - the Skerries Reef has claimed dozens of vessels, including the SS Castilian in 1943, whose munitions cargo is still down there and still off-limits. But the count would be far higher without the tower. William Trench's bankruptcy, and the fortune his heirs built on top of it, paid for one of the most consequential pieces of infrastructure on the Irish Sea.
Skerries Lighthouse sits at 53.421N, 4.608W on the largest of a group of rocky islets about 3 km off Carmel Head, at the northwest corner of Anglesey. Visible from a long way out - the white tower against dark rock makes it one of the most striking lighthouses in Wales from the air. Nearest airfield is RAF Valley (EGOV) 12 nm south-southwest; Caernarfon (EGCK) 22 nm south. The islets and surrounding water are a designated Special Protection Area for terns - maintain at least 1,500 ft AGL to avoid disturbing breeding seabirds between April and August. Strong tidal streams in the channel between the Skerries and Carmel Head create visible standing waves at certain states of the tide; best seen near low water springs.