I was actually in Scotland with my daughter when I found out about the lighthouse in To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, which she was reading at the time. Though set on the Isle of Skye in Scotland, the eponymous lighthouse is in fact Godrevy lighthouse in Cornwall.

Woolf spent happy childhood holidays in Cornwall, staying in St Ives, where she could see Godrevy lighthouse in the distance. The autobiographical modernist novel, about a family renting a summer house on the Isle of Skye over ten years, uses the lighthouse – “distant, austere, in the midst” – as a central theme in the story. Woolf considered To the Lighthouse “easily the best of my books”.

The lighthouse was built in 1859 after the steamer Nile crashed into the treacherous Stones reef near St Ives, killing all on board. The civil engineer was James Walker, who built over 20 lighthouses in his career, including the Bishops Rock lighthouse on the Isles of Scilly (apparently the smallest island in the world with a building on it).

When on holiday in St Ives, Virginia Woolf stayed at Talland House, situated above Porthminster beach, which her family would holiday in every summer for ten years, just like in the book. After years of campaigning, a commemorative plaque was unveiled last year on Talland House, called a “crucial part of the Woolf story”.

Previously on Barnflakes
The Cornish shipwreck that inspired Du Maurier
Notes on Cornish fiction