Cawsand Cottage

17/06/2026

The Eddystone Series · Part Four of Six

The shore connection.

This is the part of the story that belongs directly to Cawsand and Kingsand.

In 1882, the current lighthouse was completed - designed by James Douglass, Engineer-in-Chief of Trinity House, standing 49 metres above the sea. Twenty years later, in 1902, Trinity House built something equally important on shore.

A fog signal station at Penlee Point. Less than a mile from Cawsand, along the coast path.

Three substantial cottages were built to house the keepers and their families. A fog signal building housed twin reed horns that sounded a blast every ten seconds whenever the lighthouse disappeared from view. Keepers watched the Eddystone from this headland, day and night, through two world wars and for over eighty years.

Children grew up at Penlee Point with the sound of the horn and the light on the horizon. At least one person who lived there from childhood still lives in Cawsand today.

When the lighthouse became fully automatic in 1982, ending 284 years of human keepers, control passed to the Penlee Point station. The Eddystone has been monitored from this headland ever since.

The signal houses you can see from the coast path above Cawsand are not just old buildings. They are the shore-side heart of the lighthouse’s story. A direct, living link to the light nine miles out to sea.

16/06/2026

Everywhere you look in the village there are stunning views

14/06/2026

Perfect mornings

11/06/2026

10/06/2026

The Eddystone Series · Part Three of Six

Stone, fire and oak.

After Winstanley, a silk merchant named John Rudyard built the second lighthouse in 1709. He took a shipbuilder’s approach rather than an architect’s, designing a smooth conical tower that could shed the sea rather than fight it. It stood for forty-seven years.

On the night of 2 December 1755, a candle set the lantern roof alight. The keeper on watch was Henry Hall - ninety-four years old, and by all accounts still remarkably active. He fought the fire heroically, throwing buckets of water upward at the flames. As he looked up, molten lead from the roof poured into his mouth. He was rescued, but died twelve days later. The piece of lead recovered from his stomach is now in the National Museums of Scotland.

Then came John Smeaton. He modelled his new stone tower on the shape of an oak tree, broad and rooted at the base, tapering above, and invented hydraulic lime cement to hold the granite blocks together underwater. It was a revolution in engineering. His tower was lit in 1759 and stood for 120 years, until the rock beneath it began to crack.

Plymouth loved Smeaton’s tower so much that when it had to come down, the city paid to dismantle it stone by stone and rebuild it on Plymouth Hoe, where it still stands today in its red and white stripes - just across the Sound from Cawsand.

08/06/2026

The Eddystone - The man who dared the storm.

In 1696, an eccentric showman and engineer named Henry Winstanley walked into the Admiralty in London and declared that he would build a lighthouse on the Eddystone Rocks. He was told it was impossible. He did it anyway.

On 14 November 1698, the world’s first open ocean lighthouse was lit. For five years, no ships were wrecked on the Eddystone. Winstanley’s extraordinary, ornate wooden tower had worked.

He had such faith in his creation that he said publicly he wished to be inside it during “the greatest storm there ever was.”

On 27 November 1703, during the most violent storm ever recorded in British history, he got his wish. By morning, there was no trace of the lighthouse, or of the man who built it.

Eight thousand sailors died in the Great Storm of 1703. Winstanley’s tower had stood for five years. But his idea - that a light could and should burn on those rocks — lived on. Within six years, someone else was already building.

07/06/2026

The Eddystone Series · Part One of Six

The Wicked Reef.

Before there was a lighthouse, there was only fear.

Nine miles from the shore at Cawsand, a group of submerged rocks called the Eddystone sat directly in the path of every ship approaching Plymouth Sound - one of England’s most vital naval harbours. They were so feared that sailors would cross to the French coast rather than risk sailing near them.

In 1620, even Christopher Jones, captain of the Mayflower, described them plainly: “A wicked reef of twenty-three rust red rocks lying nine-and-a-half miles south of the Devon mainland — great ragged stones around which the sea constantly eddies, a great danger to all ships hereabouts.”

From the shore at Cawsand, the fishing community here knew those rocks intimately. Every storm. Every wreck. Every boat that didn’t come home.

This week we are telling the story of the lighthouse that changed all of that - and the deep, personal connection between the Eddystone and the villages of the Rame Peninsula that most people don’t know about.

Six posts. Three hundred and twenty-seven years of history. Starting here.

06/06/2026

Not every day is flat calm

03/06/2026

Beach Days are the best, when the days are so warm that there is nothing better to do than enjoy the view and relax

01/06/2026

Friday night was perfect, cheesy chips from The Halfway House Inn, Kingsand, and a glass of rose, girt beach and lovely company