Qualla: Start Point Lighthouse

Start Point Lighthouse: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nilfanion, CC BY-SA 3.0. Start Point juts almost a mile out into the western English Channel, a finger of dark schist pointing toward France. At the tip stands a white granite tower 92 feet tall, finished in 1836 with a Gothic crenellated parapet and a single revolving light. It was the first lighthouse in Trinity House's care ever fitted with a Fresnel lens - the technology that, ever since, has been the way most lighthouses on Earth throw a beam across the dark. For most of its working life the men who tended it could only get on and off by boat. Today the road runs almost to the gate, and you can walk out to the lantern on a summer afternoon if the weather will let you.

Read more: Start Point Lighthouse on Qualla

Image: Nilfanion | CC BY-SA 3.0

Start Point Lighthouse: James Walker's Tower

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rodw, Public domain. The man who designed Start Point was James Walker, the Scottish engineer who designed around 22 lighthouses still standing around the British coast, from the Smalls off Pembrokeshire to the Wolf Rock off Land's End. Walker liked his towers Gothic - hood mouldings, Tudor arches, c...

Read more: Start Point Lighthouse on Qualla

Image: Rodw | Public domain

Start Point Lighthouse: First of the Fresnels

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nilfanion, CC BY-SA 4.0. The original optic was the new thing in 1836: an octagonal array of eight first-order Fresnel lenses, each one a stepped glass disc that focused light far more efficiently than the polished reflectors lighthouses had used before. Seven tiers of concave mirrors stacked above the l...

Read more: Start Point Lighthouse on Qualla

Image: Nilfanion | CC BY-SA 4.0

Start Point Lighthouse: The Foghorn on the Cliff

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jonathan Billinger, CC BY-SA 2.0. The light was not enough when fog closed in. From 1862 a bell hung in a small building on the cliff face, ringing 48 times a minute, the mechanism driven by a falling weight inside a tube that ran down the sheer rock. In 1877 a siren replaced the bell - a horizontal horn on the r...

Read more: Start Point Lighthouse on Qualla

Image: Jonathan Billinger | CC BY-SA 2.0

Start Point Lighthouse: Living on the Point

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rodw, Public domain. Until 1871 the keepers and their families lived inside the tower itself, on the ground and first floors. New keepers' houses went up that year either side of the porches; a third cottage followed in 1882, set back a little to the east. James Douglass designed them all. The keeper...

Read more: Start Point Lighthouse on Qualla

Image: Rodw | Public domain

Start Point Lighthouse: Walk Out on a Summer Day

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Matt Buck from London, United Kingdom, CC BY-SA 2.0. The headland is one of the most dramatic stretches of the South West Coast Path. From the car park half a mile inland, the lane drops steeply between gorse and bracken, the Skerries Bank visible offshore where the green of shallow water turns to deeper blue and back. Seabirds nes...

Read more: Start Point Lighthouse on Qualla

Image: Matt Buck from London, United Kingdom | CC BY-SA 2.0