Qualla: Tater Du Lighthouse

Tater Du Lighthouse: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nilfanion, CC BY-SA 4.0. Cornwall has lighthouses older than the union of England and Scotland - Lizard, Longships, Wolf Rock, the Eddystone offshore - all of them built in answer to wrecks that had already happened. Tater Du is the youngest of them, first lit in July 1965, and it joined the chain only because a small Spanish coaster called the Juan Ferrer broke up on Boscawen Point in the dark on 23 October 1963 and eleven of her crew drowned. The Newlyn and Mousehole Fishermen's Association went to Trinity House and made the case that what had happened to the Juan Ferrer could happen again, and they were right. The squat white concrete tower below the headland east of Lamorna is the only lighthouse in Cornwall built within living memory, and it exists because eleven Spaniards did not come home.

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Image: Nilfanion | CC BY-SA 4.0

Tater Du Lighthouse: The Juan Ferrer

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sheila Russell, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Juan Ferrer was a coastal trading vessel - a small workhorse type of ship that carried mixed cargo around the western European coasts in the 1950s and 1960s. On 23 October 1963 she came in too close to the cliffs at Boscawen Point in conditions she could not survive. The vess...

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Image: Sheila Russell | CC BY-SA 2.0

Tater Du Lighthouse: Seventy-Two Voices

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tony Atkin, CC BY-SA 2.0. The original fog signal at Tater Du was strange to look at and stranger to hear. Seventy-two Tannoy speaker units were built directly into the tower, powered by an alternator coupled to a two-cylinder Ruston diesel engine. When fog rolled in, the lighthouse spoke through its ring...

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Image: Tony Atkin | CC BY-SA 2.0

Tater Du Lighthouse: Variscan Cliffs

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit EvaK, CC BY-SA 2.5. The cliffs and coastal slope around Tater Du have been a Site of Special Scientific Interest since 1992, notified for the geological record they preserve of South-West England during the Variscan orogeny - the mountain-building event around 300 million years ago that produced the...

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Image: EvaK | CC BY-SA 2.5

Tater Du Lighthouse: The Coast Path

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rod Allday, CC BY-SA 2.0. Tater Du is reached on foot, by a steep access road that drops down from the cliff-top to the lighthouse compound. The South West Coast Path runs along the cliffs above. From the path, the lighthouse looks toy-like - a small white tower clinging to a green slope above dark rocks ...

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Image: Rod Allday | CC BY-SA 2.0