Chart № 1 · Twenty-four lights

The Atlas

Not a complete list of anything, just the lighthouses I keep returning to, in thought if not in person. Each card gives the year the light was first shown from the present tower, the height of the structure, and the characteristic as I noted it on my visit.

Showing 24 lighthouses on every coast.

North Sea

Shallow, short-tempered and full of moving sand. My home water.

53°22′N 005°13′E

Brandaris

West-Terschelling, Netherlands

Lit: 1594
Height: 55 m
Light: Fl W 5s

The oldest surviving lighthouse tower in the Netherlands stands not on the shore but in the middle of the village, a square brick tower that has watched the Vlieland channel for over four centuries. It is named for Saint Brendan, the voyaging monk, and it is not open to visitors, which suits it. The best view is still from the bridge of the Harlingen ferry at dusk, as the first flash comes round.

Seen on ~4,000 crossingsSee it flash

52°58′N 004°43′E

Lange Jaap

Den Helder, Netherlands

Lit: 1878
Height: 63.5 m
Light: Fl(4) W 20s

“Tall Jacob” is the tallest cast-iron lighthouse in Europe and the tallest lighthouse of any kind in the Netherlands, a red column bolted together from prefabricated rings. It guards the Marsdiep, the fast tidal gap between Den Helder and Texel. Cracks found in the iron closed it to visitors in 2019, and the town has argued about its future ever since. The light, at least, still turns.

Visited Aug 2020See it flash

56°26′N 002°23′W

Bell Rock

Off Arbroath, Scotland

Lit: 1811
Height: 35 m
Light: Fl W 5s

Eleven miles out in the North Sea, on a reef that shows itself only at low water, Robert Stevenson's masons worked in short tidal windows for three summers. The light was first shown on 1 February 1811 and it is the oldest surviving sea-washed lighthouse in the world. Legend has it an abbot once hung a warning bell on the reef, and a pirate cut it loose. He drowned on the same rock.

Seen by boat Sep 2019See it flash

57°07′N 008°36′E

Hanstholm Fyr

Thy, Denmark

Lit: 1843
Height: 23 m
Light: Fl(3) W 20s

The tower is modest, but it stands on a limestone knoll so the lamp sits some 65 metres above the sea, and for decades this was among the most powerful lights in Denmark. Around it the hill is riddled with concrete bunkers from the 1940s. On a clear night the triple flash carries far out over the Skagerrak, where the fishing fleet comes home.

Visited Jun 2021See it flash

57°27′N 009°47′E

Rubjerg Knude

Lønstrup, Denmark

Lit: 1900
Height: 23 m
Light: Dark since 1968

A lighthouse that lost its argument with the wind. Drifting sand piled up around it until the beam could no longer be seen from the sea, and the light was put out in 1968. The cliff kept eroding, and in October 2019 the whole tower was jacked onto rails and rolled about 70 metres inland while thousands watched. It now stands alone in the dunes like something left behind by a tide.

Visited Jun 2021Unlit

53°51′N 008°05′E

Roter Sand

Weser estuary, Germany

Lit: 1885
Height: 30 m
Light: Dark since 1964

The first lighthouse ever built on a caisson sunk into open sea. The first attempt, in 1881, was knocked over by a storm before it could be filled; the second held. Red, white and black, with little turret oriels, it looks like a castle that wandered off the land. Retired in 1964, it is now kept as a monument, and a few lucky people each summer are allowed to sleep inside it.

Seen by boat Jul 2023Unlit

Atlantic

Granite towers, the long swell, and four-thousand-mile fetches.

47°48′N 004°22′W

Phare d'Eckmühl

Penmarc'h, Brittany, France

Lit: 1897
Height: 65 m
Light: Fl W 5s

Paid for by the daughter of one of Napoleon's marshals, who left a fortune in her will for a lighthouse on a dangerous coast, so that the tears her father caused might be redeemed by lives saved. The octagonal granite tower is lined inside with pale opaline tiles, and the spiral stair climbs through what feels like the inside of a seashell.

Visited Jul 2022See it flash

48°03′N 004°59′W

Ar-Men

Chaussée de Sein, Brittany, France

Lit: 1881
Height: 37 m
Light: Fl(3) W 20s

Breton keepers ranked their postings as paradise (islands), purgatory (shore lights) and hell (rocks). Ar-Men was “the hell of hells”. The rock was dry and landable only a few hours a year, so building the tower took fourteen seasons. Men worked roped to iron rings, and each time a wave came over, they flattened themselves on the stone. I have only seen it from the Île de Sein, a pale finger in the spray.

Seen from Sein Jul 2022See it flash

51°23′N 009°36′W

Fastnet

Off West Cork, Ireland

Lit: 1904
Height: 54 m
Light: Fl W 5s

“Ireland's Teardrop”: for emigrant ships leaving Queenstown it was often the last piece of Ireland anyone would see. The present tower replaced a cast-iron one and was built of Cornish granite, each block cut to dovetail with its neighbours so the whole tower locks together like a puzzle. Yachtsmen know it as the turning mark of the Fastnet Race.

Boat from Baltimore Aug 2018See it flash

52°07′N 006°56′W

Hook Head

County Wexford, Ireland

Tower: c. 1210
Height: 35 m
Light: Fl W 3s

A medieval keep that happens to be a lighthouse. Tradition says monks kept a warning fire on the headland long before the Normans arrived; the stone tower followed in the early thirteenth century, with walls thick enough to hold staircases inside them. White with two black bands, it is one of the oldest operational lighthouses in the world, and the guided climb is one of the best anywhere.

Visited Apr 2022See it flash

43°23′N 008°24′W

Tower of Hercules

A Coruña, Galicia, Spain

Built: 2nd c. AD
Height: 55 m
Light: Fl(4) W 20s

The only Roman lighthouse still doing its job. The core is Roman masonry from around the reign of Trajan, wrapped in a neoclassical granite skin in the 1790s. Walk down into the foundations and you can see the original stonework and the scars of the ramp that once spiralled round the outside. A UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2009, and a fine place to watch Atlantic weather arrive.

Visited Mar 2023See it flash

44°29′N 063°55′W

Peggy's Point

Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia, Canada

Lit: 1915
Height: 15 m
Light: F G

Small, octagonal, white with a red lantern, perched on a sea of rounded granite boulders that glaciers dropped here and forgot. It may be the most photographed lighthouse in Canada, and for years it held a tiny summer post office. The black rocks are dangerous when wet; the signs saying so are not decoration.

Visited Oct 2018See it shine

35°15′N 075°32′W

Cape Hatteras

Outer Banks, North Carolina, USA

Lit: 1870
Height: 60 m
Light: Fl W 7.5s

The tallest brick lighthouse in the United States marks the Diamond Shoals, the heart of what sailors called the Graveyard of the Atlantic. When the ocean crept within a few dozen metres of its base, the tower was lifted and rolled 2,900 feet inland in the summer of 1999. The black-and-white barber-pole spiral is its daymark, recognisable from miles away.

Visited Sep 2025See it flash

Baltic

Brackish, almost tideless, and locked in ice some winters.

58°55′N 022°12′E

Kõpu

Hiiumaa, Estonia

Begun: 1531
Height: 36 m
Light: Fl W 3s

A square limestone tower with great sloping buttresses, built at the request of Tallinn's Hanseatic merchants who were tired of losing ships on the Hiiu shoals. It sits on the highest hill of the island, so although the tower is not tall the light shines from more than a hundred metres above the sea. One of the oldest lighthouses in the world in continuous use.

Visited Aug 2023See it flash

56°12′N 016°24′E

Långe Jan

Ottenby, Öland, Sweden

Lit: 1785
Height: 42 m
Light: Fl W 9s

“Long John” is the tallest lighthouse in Sweden, standing on the flat southern tip of Öland where migrating birds funnel down to the sea. Partly built from the stones of a ruined chapel, it was plastered white with a single black band. The bird observatory next door has been ringing migrants since the 1940s, and the lighthouse has always been part of their story.

Visited Jun 2026See it flash

54°36′N 018°49′E

Hel

Hel Peninsula, Poland

Lit: 1942
Height: 41.5 m
Light: Fl W 10s

The old tower on this point was blown up by its own defenders in September 1939 so that it could not serve as an aiming mark for the guns across the bay. The red-brick octagon that replaced it went up during the occupation. Today it is the tallest lighthouse in Poland, at the very tip of a sand spit thirty-five kilometres long and, in places, barely two hundred metres wide.

Visited Oct 2026See it flash

54°41′N 013°26′E

Kap Arkona

Rügen, Germany

Lit: 1902
Height: 35 m
Light: Fl(3) W 17s

Two lighthouses side by side on a chalk cliff: the squat square tower designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel and first lit in 1827, and its taller round-brick successor. The old one is now a small museum; the new one carries the light. Between them stands a naval direction-finding tower, which makes the headland look like an outdoor museum of ways to find yourself.

Visited Oct 2021See it flash

Mediterranean

Old harbours, steep capes, and lights that guided galleys.

44°24′N 008°54′E

La Lanterna

Genoa, Italy

Rebuilt: 1543
Height: 77 m
Light: Fl(2) W 20s

The symbol of Genoa and one of the tallest traditional lighthouses on earth: two stacked square towers on a rock above the harbour, the whole thing built and rebuilt since the twelfth century. Among its keepers in the 1440s, the city records list one Antonio Colombo, an uncle of a certain Christopher. There is a museum in the old fortifications and a path along the walls from the ferry terminal.

Visited Jan 2024See it flash

39°58′N 003°13′E

Cap de Formentor

Mallorca, Spain

Lit: 1863
Height: 22 m
Light: Fl(4) W 20s

The tower is small, but it sits on a cliff some two hundred metres above the sea at the end of one of the most spectacular roads in Europe. Before the road, keepers came by mule track, and supplies took a day. In high summer private cars are turned back and a shuttle bus does the work; go in April and you may have the goats to yourself.

Visited Apr 2018See it flash

36°21′N 025°21′E

Akrotiri

Santorini, Greece

Lit: 1892
Height: 10 m
Light: Fl W 10s

A whitewashed tower and keeper's house on the southwestern horn of the caldera, built by a French company in the 1890s. Most visitors arrive half an hour before sunset and leave five minutes after, which means the best time to be here is just after everyone goes, when the first flash lights the cliffs and the sea turns the colour of ink.

Visited Sep 2018See it flash

Pacific & Southern Seas

Fog banks, bluffs and the far side of the world.

38°00′N 123°01′W

Point Reyes

Marin County, California, USA

Lit: 1870
Height: 11 m
Light: Lens retired 1975

Built low on purpose: halfway down a cliff, below the fog that hangs on the headland for weeks at a time, reached by some three hundred concrete steps. It is one of the windiest and foggiest places on the Pacific coast. The original first-order Fresnel lens, made in Paris, is still in the lantern, and a modern beacon nearby does the actual work.

Visited May 2025Historic lens

34°26′S 172°41′E

Cape Reinga

Te Rerenga Wairua, New Zealand

Lit: 1941
Height: 10 m
Light: Fl W 12s

At the top of the North Island, where the Tasman Sea meets the Pacific in a long line of colliding waves. In Māori tradition this is the place where the spirits of the dead leave the land, sliding down the roots of an old pōhutukawa into the sea. The little white tower is solar-powered now; the place deserves quiet, and mostly gets it.

Visited Nov 2024See it flash

38°28′S 144°06′E

Split Point

Aireys Inlet, Victoria, Australia

Lit: 1891
Height: 34 m
Light: Fl(2) W 10s

Locals call it the White Queen: a tall concrete tower with a red cap above the Great Ocean Road, looking out over Bass Strait and Eagle Rock. A generation of Australian children knows it from a television series filmed here. The cafe in the old stables makes a decent flat white, which in a lighthouse visit is not nothing.

Visited Nov 2024See it flash

35°42′N 140°52′E

Inubōsaki

Chōshi, Chiba, Japan

Lit: 1874
Height: 31 m
Light: Fl W 15s

Designed by the Scottish engineer Richard Henry Brunton, who built dozens of lights in Meiji-era Japan, and raised in brick made locally after imported bricks proved too costly. It stands on the easternmost point of the Kantō plain, among the first places in Japan to see the sun on New Year's morning, when thousands come to watch it rise behind the tower.

Visited Mar 2018See it flash