Qualla: Dungeness Lighthouse

Dungeness Lighthouse: Introduction

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. Five lighthouses, in roughly the same place, over four hundred years - all chasing the same retreating shoreline. Dungeness is a cuspate foreland, a great triangular tongue of shingle that the English Channel keeps piling up faster than anything else on Britain's coast, and every generation of mariners has had to plant a new beacon a little further out to keep up. The current tower, opened on 20 November 1961, is a 43-metre cylinder of pre-cast concrete rings with its black and white stripes impregnated into the material itself. It went up because the new nuclear power station next door was blocking the view of its predecessor - and someone had to keep warning ships off the shingle.

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Image: Public domain

Dungeness Lighthouse: A Shore That Will Not Stay Put

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Neil, CC BY 2.0. Dungeness is geology in motion. The Channel currents sweep shingle counter-clockwise along the south coast and dump it here, building the spit eastward by several metres a year. The very first beacon went up sometime before 1615, replaced by a proper lighthouse that year, which t...

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Image: Neil | CC BY 2.0

Dungeness Lighthouse: Faraday's Electric Experiment

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nilfanion, CC BY-SA 4.0. In the early 1860s Michael Faraday, the great electrical physicist and Trinity House's scientific adviser, chose Dungeness as the first British lighthouse to receive a permanent electric installation. A carbon arc lamp backed by a silvered reflector, suspended above the old oil l...

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Image: Nilfanion | CC BY-SA 4.0

Dungeness Lighthouse: Trumpets and Sirens

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Baker, CC BY-SA 2.0. The fog work at Dungeness was as experimental as the light. In 1862 the American inventor Celadon Daboll demonstrated his reed-driven compressed-air trumpet here to the Elder Brethren of Trinity House, sounding it against a bell and a steam horn for comparison. The trumpet won. T...

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Image: John Baker | CC BY-SA 2.0

Dungeness Lighthouse: The Old Tower

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nilfanion, CC BY-SA 4.0. Just inland from the current concrete cylinder stands the fourth lighthouse, the one that the nuclear station obscured. The Prince of Wales - the future George V - lit it on 31 March 1904. It is a circular brick tower 41 metres high, 11 metres across at the base, with 169 steps s...

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Image: Nilfanion | CC BY-SA 4.0

Dungeness Lighthouse: What the Stripes Are For

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit DeFacto, CC BY-SA 4.0. Up close, the 1961 tower has the slightly austere look of mid-century engineering done well. The black and white bands are not paint - the pigment was cast into each precast concrete ring, so the markings cannot fade or peel. Inside, the lamp itself has been replaced more than on...

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Image: DeFacto | CC BY-SA 4.0