Lighthouse Notesfield journal · Maren Holt

Chart № 4 · The logbook

Journal

The deck log, more or less. I write the wind the way I wrote it on the bridge: direction and Beaufort force, then the sky, then the temperature. Everything else is whatever I could not stop thinking about on the way home.

2026

Hel, at the end of the sand

  • Place Hel Peninsula, Poland
  • Weather W 5–6, squalls, 9 °C
  • Light Fl W 10s

Took the little train from Gdynia all the way out along the spit, which is a strange journey: pine forest on both sides, and through the trees, water on both sides too, the open Baltic to the left and the calm bay to the right. In places the land is so narrow you can see both at once.

The tower is red brick and octagonal and very serious. I climbed it in a squall that rattled the windows of the stair like loose teeth. At the top the keeper on duty (a volunteer, a retired fisherman with a magnificent moustache) told me that the old lighthouse stood about where we were drinking our tea from a thermos. On the walk back I watched a grey seal watching me from the surf, both of us unimpressed by the weather.

Midsummer at Långe Jan

  • Place Ottenby, Öland, Sweden
  • Weather SE 2, clear, 14 °C at 03:00
  • Light Fl W 9s

Midsummer Eve on the southern tip of Öland. There is barely any night at all at this latitude in June: the sky went from gold to a kind of luminous blue-grey and then straight back to gold again, and the lighthouse flashed away throughout like someone who had not been told the party was over.

The ringers at the bird station invited me to watch them work. At three in the morning a young volunteer from Kalmar held out a reed warbler, weighed it in a plastic tube, fitted a ring the size of a wedding band for a doll, and let it go. It flew toward the lighthouse. I had been writing the Öland story for the keepers page that week, and had to sit down on a rock for a while.

A church tower that kept its faith in other ways

  • Place Westkapelle, Zeeland, Netherlands
  • Weather NW 5, hail showers, 6 °C
  • Light Fl W 3s

Westkapelle Hoog was a church tower for four hundred years before it was a lighthouse. The church burned in the 1830s and the tower was left standing alone, a lantern on top, behind the great sea dyke. From the top you look down on the dyke and realise that the sea outside is higher than the fields inside.

Hail came in sideways twice while I was up there. I sat out the second shower on the stairs with a family from Middelburg whose small son was entirely convinced that the lighthouse was holding the sea back on its own. I did not correct him. In a sense it is part of the same effort.

2025

The lighthouse that walked inland

  • Place Buxton, Outer Banks, North Carolina, USA
  • Weather NE 4, humid, 27 °C, long swell
  • Light Fl W 7.5s

A hurricane was passing far out to sea, and though the sky was blue the swell was enormous, slow, heavy rollers that came in like freight trains. The beach where Cape Hatteras lighthouse used to stand was half underwater. I walked out to the old foundation stones, now laid in a circle with the names of the keepers carved in them, and turned round.

The tower is a long way back now, in among the trees. In 1999 it was moved on hydraulic jacks and rollers along a steel track, a few feet at a time, over twenty-three days. Engineers had argued for years about whether it could be done without the bricks cracking. It was, and they did not. On the climb, a park ranger told me the spiral daymark was never meant to look like a barber's pole. I think it was always going to.

Three hundred steps into the fog

  • Place Point Reyes National Seashore, California, USA
  • Weather NW 7, thick fog, 11 °C
  • Light Historic lens; modern beacon in use

Couldn't see the lighthouse from the top of the stairs. Couldn't see it from halfway down either. Then, about forty steps from the bottom, the fog peeled back like a curtain and there it was, small and white and bolted to the rock face, with the huge Paris-made lens glittering inside the lantern.

The wind at the bottom was strong enough that a ranger was holding the door open with her whole weight. Afterwards I drove to Inverness and met Carol, whose memories became the last story on the keepers page. The climb back up the three hundred steps was entirely in fog again. Counting them helped.

2024

The White Queen of Aireys Inlet

  • Place Split Point, Victoria, Australia
  • Weather S 5, bright and cold, 16 °C
  • Light Fl(2) W 10s

Drove the Great Ocean Road from Torquay in a hired car whose indicator stalk was on the wrong side, so I signalled every turn with the windscreen wipers. The tower is white, tall and slightly regal, which is how it gets its nickname, and from the top you look straight down onto Eagle Rock and the long, cold swell of Bass Strait.

A man of about my age in the tour group pointed out the window and said “that's where the boat sank in episode four”, and three other adults nodded seriously. Apparently a whole generation of Australians grew up with this lighthouse on television. I have never felt so foreign, or so welcome.

Where two oceans meet

  • Place Cape Reinga / Te Rerenga Wairua, New Zealand
  • Weather SW 4, sun, 19 °C
  • Light Fl W 12s

The farthest I have ever travelled for a lighthouse: about 18,000 kilometres from Harlingen, give or take a few bus changes. And it is a modest lighthouse, a small white tower with a solar panel. But below it, off the point, you can see the Tasman Sea and the Pacific running into each other along a line of white water, as if somebody had drawn a seam.

Signs ask visitors not to eat or drink near the point, out of respect for its place in Māori tradition as the departure point for the spirits of the dead. Most people walked down quietly, looked, and walked back up just as quietly. I stayed until the bus driver honked, and then a little longer.

Winter sun on La Lanterna

  • Place Genoa, Liguria, Italy
  • Weather N 4 (tramontana), clear, 8 °C
  • Light Fl(2) W 20s

Walked from the ferry terminal along the raised path beside the old walls, with container cranes on one side and the city stacked up the hills on the other. La Lanterna is enormous: two square towers on top of each other, rising out of the rock like a medieval skyscraper. In January the museum was all but empty and the guide let me linger at every window.

The cold north wind had scoured the air so clean that from the terrace I could see the snow on the Maritime Alps. The guide mentioned, casually, that a member of the Columbus family was once a keeper here. Afterwards I ate focaccia on a bollard and thought about how many sailors this light has seen off, and how few of them knew where they were going.

2023

Lighthouse weekend on Hiiumaa

  • Place Kõpu, Hiiumaa, Estonia
  • Weather SW 3, warm, 21 °C
  • Light Fl W 3s

Timed this trip for the International Lighthouse and Lightship Weekend, when radio amateurs set up stations at lighthouses all over the world and call each other across the oceans. There was a club from Tartu in a tent at the foot of Kõpu with a long wire antenna strung into the pines, and one of them let me listen to a contact in Scotland. Lighthouse to lighthouse, voices instead of beams.

The tower itself is unlike anything else I know: a huge square limestone column with buttresses sloping down on every side like the roots of a tree. From the top, across a sea of forest, you see actual sea on three sides. I thought about Liisa climbing these stairs every four hours in the ice, and walked up a second time for her.

Roman stones in Atlantic rain

  • Place A Coruña, Galicia, Spain
  • Weather W 6, rain bands, 13 °C
  • Light Fl(4) W 20s

Galicia in March is a lesson in rain. It comes in bands from the Atlantic, each one announced by a darker shade of grey on the horizon, and between them the sun comes out and the granite steams. The Tower of Hercules stands on a bare hill above the city, and walking up to it between showers felt like approaching something very old and very patient.

Inside, under the eighteenth-century skin, you walk through the Roman core: rough, massive masonry, the oldest working lighthouse fabric anywhere. I put my hand on it and tried to feel something nineteen centuries deep. Mostly I felt damp. It was still one of the best afternoons of the year.

2022

Granite, opaline and the hell of hells

  • Place Penmarc'h and Île de Sein, Brittany, France
  • Weather NW 3, sunny, 22 °C
  • Light Fl W 5s (Eckmühl), Fl(3) W 20s (Ar-Men)

Morning at Eckmühl: a granite giant, and inside, a spiral stair walled in pale opaline tiles that catch the light like the inside of a shell. At the top I could see the whole low coast of Penmarc'h laid out like a chart, rocks and all.

Afternoon on the ferry from Audierne to Sein, the island that is barely above sea level. From the western tip, through binoculars, I found Ar-Men: a thin pale stick on the horizon with white water around its base, even on a calm summer day. I had read so much about it that seeing it felt like meeting someone famous across a crowded room. I did not wave. I am almost sure I did not wave.

Eight hundred years and counting

  • Place Hook Head, County Wexford, Ireland
  • Weather E 4, bright, 11 °C
  • Light Fl W 3s

Easter crowds, a queue of families and a guide with a voice that could have worked a fog signal. None of it mattered once we were inside, climbing through rooms carved out of walls four metres thick, past the place where the monks' fire is said to have burned, and up the last steep stair onto the gallery.

The flat limestone of the headland is full of fossils, and after the tour I spent an hour on my knees finding crinoids and brachiopods three hundred million years old, while the lighthouse flashed above me every three seconds. Old next to older. I drove to the ferry at Rosslare with sore knees and an absurd sense of proportion.

2021

Two towers on a chalk cliff

  • Place Kap Arkona, Rügen, Germany
  • Weather NE 4, overcast, 12 °C
  • Light Fl(3) W 17s

Walked from Putgarten along the cliff top, with the white chalk falling away to a beach of flint and the Baltic a flat, steely grey all the way to Denmark. Kap Arkona has two lighthouses standing almost shoulder to shoulder: Schinkel's small square tower from 1827 and the tall round one that replaced it.

The old one has become a little museum, the new one does the work, and the pair of them look like an old couple on a bench. I liked them both. On the way down to the fishing hamlet of Vitt a woman was selling smoked fish from a hut, and I ate it on the harbour wall in the first proper autumn wind of the year.

The lighthouse in the dunes

  • Place Rubjerg Knude and Hanstholm, Jutland, Denmark
  • Weather W 5, sun and blowing sand, 15 °C
  • Light Unlit (Rubjerg Knude); Fl(3) W 20s (Hanstholm)

The first trip abroad after a long, strange year. Rubjerg Knude stands in a great dune now, moved back from the eroding cliff in 2019, and the sand moves around it constantly. I climbed the dune on all fours, wind at my back, and got sand in places sand should not be.

In the evening I drove up the coast to Hanstholm, where the lighthouse stands among the concrete bunkers of the old coastal fortress. At dusk the triple flash came on over the Skagerrak and the first trawlers of the night were heading out. It felt like the world starting up again.

2020

Home waters, Tall Jacob

  • Place Den Helder, Noord-Holland, Netherlands
  • Weather SW 6, sunny intervals, 19 °C
  • Light Fl(4) W 20s

A summer of not going anywhere, so I went somewhere close. I cycled to Den Helder along the dyke against a headwind that would have stopped a smaller woman, and spent the afternoon walking around the foot of Lange Jaap. It has been closed since last year because of cracks in the cast iron, and there are fences around it now.

Even so, it is magnificent: a red iron column sixty-odd metres high, the tallest lighthouse in the country. I sat on the dyke and watched the Texel ferry cross the Marsdiep, which made me terribly homesick for something I had chosen to leave. When the light came on I counted four flashes, out of habit, and cycled home in the dark.

2019

Out to the Bell Rock

  • Place Off Arbroath, Angus, Scotland
  • Weather N 3, cloud, 13 °C
  • Light Fl W 5s

A small boat from Arbroath harbour, eleven miles out, two hours at sea in a gentle northerly swell. Half the passengers were seasick. I was not, and I am a little ashamed of how pleased that made me. Then the tower came over the horizon, slender and pale, standing up out of the sea with nothing at all around it.

We arrived near low water, when the reef shows its back like a sleeping animal, weed streaming in the tide. It is hard to believe that men built this in 1807 with oars, sails and hand cranes, working a few hours a day between tides. In the signal tower museum ashore I copied out a line from the building journal into my notebook: the masons had seen “the rock dry for three hours”. That was a good day.

Brandaris, as a passenger

  • Place West-Terschelling, Friesland, Netherlands
  • Weather SW 4, sun and showers, 14 °C
  • Light Fl W 5s

Two years after leaving the bridge, I took the ferry to Terschelling as a passenger for the first time in my life. The captain, an old colleague, invited me up, and I stood in my old place by the radar and watched someone else do my job. She did it well.

Ashore, I walked up through the village to the foot of Brandaris and simply stood there for a while. I must have seen it four thousand times, and never once touched it. The bricks were warm from the afternoon sun. That evening, on the last ferry home, I counted the flashes until Terschelling dropped below the horizon. One every five seconds. Some things you do not need to look up.