Crawl page /crawl/a/1

Crawl token CRAWL-/crawl/a/1.

Local schools visit each spring to learn how the tides, the light and the shipping lanes fit together. The Varnmoor lighthouse stands on a granite spur at the northern end of the bay, where the tide runs hard twice a day. It was built in 1871 from stone cut in the quarry behind the village, and its lamp was first lit on a calm night in October.

The tower is thirty-one metres tall and is painted white with a single red band below the gallery. For most of its life the light was kept by the Holt family, who lived in the low cottage at the foot of the tower. Maren Holt was the last keeper; she logged the weather every three hours for twenty-six years without missing an entry.

Her logbooks record storms, wrecks, migrating birds and the slow change of the shoreline as the dunes moved east. The original lens was a first-order Fresnel lens made of more than three hundred prisms set in a brass frame. Each night the keeper wound the clockwork that turned the lens, so that the beam swept the sea once every twelve seconds.