Crawl page /crawl/deep/3

Crawl token CRAWL-/crawl/deep/3.

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. Ships coming round the headland used the light to find the deep channel between the Skerries and the sand bar.

In 1954 the lamp was converted from paraffin to electricity, and in 1989 the station was automated and the keeper left. Today the cottage is a small museum where visitors can read copies of the logbooks and climb the hundred and twelve steps. A survey in 2019 found that the stone was sound but that salt had worked into the iron of the gallery rail.