The lighthouse at the end of the breakwater

A couple of weeks ago I blipped the end of Fishguard harbour's eastern breakwater.
In the background to that image you can see the northern breakwater further out. It belongs to the ferry company and is normally firmly closed but today access was granted to the public to raise funds for the lifeboat service which operates out of the harbour.

So today was my first ever opportunity to get on to this breakwater which was constructed at the end of the 19th century and completed in 1906. It consists of a massive wall on top of a banked spit which once carried a single track railway. On the seaward side hundreds, if not thousands, of huge rectangular concrete blocks, weighing tonnes, have been piled higgledy-piggledy alongside to reinforce the breakwater and resist the force of the waves (see Not Every Day's Blockade.) At the far end this old lighthouse carries a navigation beacon with a green light.

There are also the remains of wartime coastal monitoring structures, gun emplacements and a sonar device which emerged from the water and came up through the brickwork seen here. The whole edifice is weatherbeaten and windswept, rugged and unrelenting, but monumental and somehow noble in the performance of its function of protecting the harbour, year upon year.

Looking back landward, and out across the bay, the views were magnificent and I desperately wished that access was not prohibited. A local friend who was there too said that in her youth it was open to the public and kids went out there to fish. (Indeed there were lots of names scratched in the brick lookout cells, dating from the 50s to the 70s.) She also said that back then the lighthouse had sported a red light while the green one flashed from the other breakwater. Many years later it turned out that the colours had been placed the wrong way round. Not the best shipping news!

Info: The Lighthouse at the End of the World (Le Phare du Bout du Monde) is a novel by Jules Verne based on a real lighthouse off Cape Horn at the extreme southern tip of South America. It was published in 1905 just about the time this one was built.