Godrevy Lighthouse

Look out across the water. On a small green island just off the headland stands a slender white tower — Godrevy Lighthouse, guarding the mouth of St Ives Bay. Below you, in the cove, grey seals are very likely basking on the rocks, and across the bay the town of St Ives gleams white in the distance.

The lighthouse was built in 1859 by Trinity House, the ancient body that has tended the lights and marks of the English coast for centuries, and it was built out of hard necessity. Just offshore lies a low, treacherous shelf of rock called the Stones — barely visible, deadly to shipping, and the graveyard of many a vessel driven onto it by wind and tide. After a string of wrecks, including the loss of the steamer Nile in 1854, the case for a light became unanswerable. So the white tower rose on its island of hard slate and greenstone, its beam sweeping the dark to warn ships clear of the reef, night after night, year after year. It was automated in 1934, when the last keepers left, and today it runs quietly on solar power, still turning, still faithful.

But Godrevy's fame reaches far beyond Cornwall, for this little lighthouse crept into one of the great novels of the twentieth century. Virginia Woolf spent childhood summers at Talland House in St Ives, gazing out at this very light across the bay. Years later those memories surfaced in her 1927 novel, To the Lighthouse — though, novelist that she was, she quietly moved the setting to the Hebrides. The tower you are looking at is, in spirit, her lighthouse.

Now, let me point out some things to look for. First, the tower itself on its island — the classic view frames it against the blue sweep of St Ives Bay, with the town beyond. Second, look down into the cove below, Mutton Cove, where grey seals haul out to rest and, in autumn, to pup; keep well back from the edge, keep your distance, and never disturb them. Third, scan the offshore water at low tide for the dark shelf of the Stones reef, and you will understand at a glance why the light was needed. Fourth, watch the cliffs and islands for breeding seabirds, and the heath behind you for skylarks and stonechats. And fifth, keep an eye on the open bay itself, where dolphins are sometimes seen cutting through the swell.

Here is a scene to hold in your mind. Picture a small girl at a window in St Ives, a whole bay of summer between her and this tower, watching its light kindle at dusk evening after evening. That child was Virginia Woolf, and the image never left her. Her family took Talland House for summer after summer, and the bay, the tower, and the long golden evenings soaked into her forever. Decades later, sitting far away and grieving a childhood long gone, she reached back for it and built from it a novel about memory, and time, and the way a family holds together and comes apart. The lighthouse in her book is a promise endlessly deferred, a destination glimpsed across water. And here it is — real, solid, white against the sea, exactly as she first saw it. Few walkers on any coast can say they are standing inside a masterpiece.

From here the South West Coast Path follows the cliffs onward, curving round the great arc of St Ives Bay towards Hayle and, beyond it, St Ives itself. Take one last look at the white tower on its green island, and imagine the beam that still turns there in the dark. Keep back from the cliff edges above the seal cove as you go. Walk safe.