Lighthouse Keeping

A website called Vision of Britain, offering a wealth of information from census returns and elsewhere on the state of the nation past and present, which was launched at lunchtime on Tuesday, was suspended shortly afterwards because it could not cope with demand - a circumstance all the more frustrating because I was planning to ask it this question: was the census of 2001 the first in which no one gave his or her occupation as "lighthouse keeper"?

On the face of it, the answer should have been "yes", since lighthouse keeping in Britain became extinct when the last practitioner made the last journey back from North Foreland lighthouse near Broadstairs six years ago. That ended a history dating back to the middle ages (the oldest surviving lighthouse in Britain and Ireland, Hook Head, was established in 1172), of men, and occasionally women, tramping out with a month's supplies to some lonely outpost, sometimes to be shared with colleagues they didn't get on with, sometimes involving perilous feats of rescue (Grace Darling's at Longstone may be the best known, but she certainly wasn't alone).

There are rather more lighthouses scattered around our shores than most people realise. Trinity House - which has run them in England ever since a parliamentary committee in 1834 persuaded the government that the service would not be efficient until they were taken out of private ownership - superintends 71 of them. The Northern Lighthouse Board lists 207 in Scotland and the Commissioners of Irish Lights have 80 both north and south of the border.

On the Trinity House website there's a fascinating gallery of pictures of lighthouses under its charge, each with a brief account of its history: some slim and elegant, others squat and aggressive, some sturdy, some apparently frail, some perched on rock ledges with vertiginous drops to the sea, others (like Southwold) in the streets of a town.

For lighthouse enthusiasts, of the kind who form the Lighthouse Society of Britain, their architects - the Stevenson family, as commemorated in Bella Bathurst's bestselling book about them, the Douglass brothers, James and William, John Smeaton, James Walker - are as honoured as the Gilbert Scotts and Pugin and JL Pearson among devotees of churches. The Lighthouse Society of Great Britain publishes an annual CD encyclopaedia of structures around the world - 12,000 in 60 countries in the latest edition.

But could lighthouses follow their keepers into extinction - made irrelevant, as the keepers were, by the march of technology? Reports which followed the publication at the start of this month of a Trinity House paper called 2020 The Vision generated a crop of alarming stories about their possible loss from the coasts of various counties, particularly in the south-west.

Mariners of all kinds tend to depend nowadays on satellite technology rather than ancient devices - perhaps excessively so, a spokesman for Trinity House suggests. The document foresaw a reduction in overall numbers, though it said the role of those that remained was likely to be enhanced. But no casualties are likely in the immediate future, and even where closures occur there is probably little risk that familiar and well-loved landmarks will disappear from the seaside scene.

Some, having been decommissioned, have already been redeveloped as visitor centres. Lighthouse keepers' cottages have been snapped up for holiday lettings, and lighthouses may increasingly go that way too.

Yet even without demolition, the long romantic, even spiritual, appeal of the lighthouse could, in a crucial sense, be diminished. The darkness-defying beams which since Roman times have been used to warn those at sea of possible imminent peril have also brought hope and comfort to those whose lives are not remotely maritime. They're a kind of physical equivalent of good deeds in a naughty world.

Religious groups all over the country opening shops and offices offering counsel and guidance have taken to calling them lighthouses. And that connection is nothing new. The provision of warning lights around our shores to save mariners from death and destruction predates even Hook Head; and those who furnished those lights were often members of religious communities - some of them hermits who had otherwise renounced the works of this world.