A Brief Lighthouse History

by Marie-Louise Jensen

Within a short stretch of coast on the very northern tip of Jutland, there are three lighthouses. Two are decommissioned, the third is still active. They are a remarkable glimpse into the development of the lighthouse in Denmark. 

This first picture is of the Skagen's vippefyr (or 'lever light') which is a copy of the lighthouse that guided ships around the tip of Jutland from 1627 to 1747. It was the first of its kind and replaced an earlier system - a parrot light. This new design allowed the burning coals to be hoisted into the air, clearly visible to passing ships, contained in a metal basket, thus reducing the risk of setting the wooden structure alight. 

This was one of three of a kind that marked the shipping channel from the North Sea down into the Baltic - an important but treacherous route for Danish vessels, especially in the days of sail. This one defintely has a quaint, olde worlde look to it.
A short distance further north, but in sight of each other, is another lighthouse; Det hvide fyr (the white lighthouse). This looks altogether more modern, even with its lantern removed:

(Photo attribution: by Arnoldius (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons)

The white lighthouse served Skagen from 1747 to 1858. The first Danish lighthouse to be built of stone, it was originally red brick until it was whitewashed at the beginning of the 19th century. It must have originally had another name! Initially coal fired, rapeseed oil was later burned.

The third lighthouse on this small peninsula is the Skagen Lighthouse, also known as the Grey Lighthouse (Skagen fyr; det grå fyr).

This lighthouse came into use in 1858 and is still in use. It is impossible to tell from the photographs, of course, but at 46 metres tall, it is more than twice the height of its predecessor. The original parafin lamp was replaced by a 1,000 watt and then a 1,500 watt sodium lamp. It's not difficult to imagine the progress towards safety at sea that these developments must have made over the years. Having seen an old chart of shipwrecks clustered at the tip of Jutland, I know how necessary that was.
What is fascinating at Skagen, is having these three very different lighthouses from different eras all in view at once; testament to the importance of warning ships of the dangers of the peninsula through the centuries and to people's continual striving to improve the system for doing so.

Incidentally, the Skagen lighthouse is now also home to a migratory bird reserve with hides and an interactive museum inside. An excellent double use for the building.

The Lighthouse Stevensons - a review by Joan Lennon

"Scotland is moated by an awkward brew of conflicting tides and currents."  Truer words were never written.  And in The Lighthouse Stevensons, Bella Bathurst tells the tale of what the Stevenson family, over four generations, decided to do about it.

"For several long centuries," she writes, "lives lost at sea were seen by much of Europe as so much natural wastage.  Accounts still exist of sailors watching slack-handed from the gunwales while one of their colleagues drowned.  Once a person had fallen overboard, so the thinking went, he had been claimed by the sea, and it was not for mankind to challenge that claim."

But challenge it the Stevensons did.  Starting with the Bell Rock, a killer reef of rock only clear of the sea at low tide but just a few feet below the waves at high tide, they began to build lighthouses.  If they didn't know how something was to be done, they experimented.  If a tool for a job didn't exist, they invented it.  Lenses and reflectors, dovetailing and cement mixtures, studies of wave patterns and how to drill through sea rock - it was all, as the family's most famous son Robert Louis Stevenson later wrote, a "field that was unexplored; the engineer must read with his own eyes the face of nature ... [and] undertake works that were at once inventions and adventures."

Chronicling the lives and works of four generations of the Stevenson family, with their penchant for re-cycling first names, was always going to be a challenge, and I found it hard to care for some members as much as for others.  But as well as the fascinating historical details of lighthouse building in the 18th and 19th centuries, Bathurst also presents an intriguing series of complicated relationships between fathers and sons (including a repeating, worrying tendency of the younger generation to commit poetry) with sympathy and insight.  The final victim to literature was Robert Louis Stevenson, who tried his best to be an engineer, and then a lawyer, before the ultimate rebellion into writing.  But he never rated himself against the achievements of his fore-fathers.  "Whenever I smell salt water," he wrote in 1880, "I know that I am not far from one of the works of my ancestors."  And in 1886, "all the sea lights in Scotland are signed with our name ... I might write books till 1900 and not serve humanity so well; and it moves me to a certain impatience, to see the little, frothy bubble that attends the author his son, and compare it to the obscurity in which that better man finds his reward."

Bella Bathurst has done an excellent job of lighting that obscurity.    

J.M.W. Turner's Bell Rock Lighthouse (1819)

I was keen on lighthouses before I read this book.  Now you can forget keen.  Obsessed is much more the word.  Have a read of Bella Bathurst's The Lighthouse Stevensons, and you may very well join me.


P.S.  I don't always notice the newest books.  And The Lighthouse Stevensons has been around since 1999, so hardly hot off the griddle.  But that had no effect on the enjoyment! 

P.P.S. The 1823 instructions for the Bell Rock Light-keepers also makes for interesting reading, and you can have a look at it here.

P.P.P.S. And if you fancy a little youtube experience of lighthouses and big waves, try here. Ever so slightly heart-stoppingly magnificent, wouldn't you say?



Joan Lennon's website.
Joan Lennon's blog.
Silver Skin.