Inside the Lantern II, The Fastnet Lighthouse, Cork

The rawhide gloves are what I keep coming back to. They're sitting on the platform, easy to miss at first, but they tell you everything about what it took to keep this light burning. Fingerprints on a Fresnel lens would affect the beam, so you wore gloves. You climbed the ladder, cleaned every prism by hand, and kept going.

I was fortunate enough to photograph the Fastnet Lantern while it was still operational. That window has since closed. The original lens is now shrouded and still, replaced by a modern LED beacon, so this image feels like a record of something that no longer exists in quite the same way. The Lantern Room is two stories high, and from the catwalk at the top you look straight down into the heart of the lens assembly. Vertiginous, to put it mildly. Glance sideways and you're looking through the glazing to the Atlantic far below.

From this angle you can see the twin bulbs clearly. If one failed, the mechanism would rotate the second into the exact focal point. Beautifully simple engineering for something so critical. The prismatic colours shifting across the glass panels as the lens turned were genuinely remarkable. I spent longer up there than was probably sensible!