Ireland's Tear
Ireland's Tear
In stormy winter weather, the “big seas would come sailing up over the entire building like the field of horses in the Grand National,” as one former Fastnet keeper put it. Sometimes, there were almost disastrous consequences; Mr O'Driscoll remembers a storm in 1985 when a wave reached as high as the light and came crashing through the glass, overturning the vat of mercury and sending the poisonous liquid pouring down the stairs. He doubts the tower would have withstood another wallop as great as that, but it never came. Suddenly, there was a great calmness. There were moments of deep sadness, too. Missing children's birthdays, for example, because the weather turned and the ship could not get close enough to the rock to take him ashore. What do you do at those times? “There's nothing you can do,” he says. “You slowly climb back upstairs and bake more bread.”
The Fastnet light stands about 49m above mean sea level.
http://www.economist.com/node/12792727
In stormy winter weather, the “big seas would come sailing up over the entire building like the field of horses in the Grand National,” as one former Fastnet keeper put it. Sometimes, there were almost disastrous consequences; Mr O'Driscoll remembers a storm in 1985 when a wave reached as high as the light and came crashing through the glass, overturning the vat of mercury and sending the poisonous liquid pouring down the stairs. He doubts the tower would have withstood another wallop as great as that, but it never came. Suddenly, there was a great calmness. There were moments of deep sadness, too. Missing children's birthdays, for example, because the weather turned and the ship could not get close enough to the rock to take him ashore. What do you do at those times? “There's nothing you can do,” he says. “You slowly climb back upstairs and bake more bread.”
The Fastnet light stands about 49m above mean sea level.
http://www.economist.com/node/12792727
Fascinating! I love listening to the Shipping Forecast, so I'm surprised to learn how tiny Fastnet is.
ReplyDeleteGood article; except for this construction detail:
ReplyDelete"Concrete blocks were dovetailed into those around it, and cemented into those above and below, like a Chinese puzzle, so that it was impossible to remove any one stone without removing those above it. “This system of dovetail joggles absolutely bonds the entire structure into a virtual monolith,” wrote Scott. The contract to supply the granite was won by Messrs John Freeman and Sons of Penrhyn, Cornwall. In 1897 its workers started chiselling away at 2,074 stones, each weighing from 1.7 to 3 tons to create the puzzle."
That excerpt from Scott's history of the construction confuses the construction - were concrete blocks or granite blocks 'dovetailed'? Or is it a misquote by the writer of the article?
Not a misquote, but lacking in precision, I expect. Douglass worked on the earlier Eddystone light, which also used dovetails and joggles. Exactly how those dovetails and joggles were fashioned? One would have to look at the drawings that were used to fashion the blocks that were shipped and installed, and it would vary in detail at different elevations.
ReplyDeleteYou can get something of a look from the photo included in a 1907 Scientific America article (Google Books) :goo.gl/ljBK0g
Another book, written in 1897, has more detailed descriptions of some of the masonry methods employed on the Eddystone light: http://graveslightstation.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/The_Story_of_Our_Lighthouses_and_Lightships_1000436301.pdf
In this book, the Fastnet Light is described in its earlier incarnation of cast iron and masonry.
Drew McCarthy My first thought was that it must be one of those Limey idiosyncrasies of English - such as petrol for gas : /
ReplyDelete