The Fastnet from the Balcony

The lower balcony on the Fastnet sits just below the lantern, and that’s where I was, out on the edge of it with the water 130 feet straight down.

The leaning out wasn’t the hard part. The hard part was holding still once I was there, working slowly and getting the corners right, with that drop under me the whole time.

In winter storms, green water goes clean over the top of the whole tower. Solid unbroken water, not spray.

I’ve spent six or seven nights out on the rock across a number of visits over the years, and I reckon fewer than a hundred people who weren’t lightkeepers have ever slept in that tower!

William Douglass designed it, but James Kavanagh built it. He was the foreman mason, he lived out on the rock almost continuously from 1896, and he personally set every single one of the 2,047 blocks of Cornish granite that make it up. Each block dovetails into the ones around it, so the tower isn’t a stack of courses, it’s keyed together into one mass. Kavanagh laid the eighty-ninth and final course in June 1903, left the rock ill, and died a few weeks later. The light didn’t enter service until June 1904, so he never saw it lit.

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