A Tale of 4 Lighthouses

Let me tell you a story about lighthouses... and, in particular, the 4 that are situated not far from the setting of my novel The Girl from Simon's Bay.

But first, a bit of history.
For about three hundred years, lighthouses have been saving ships from the rocks that line our coastal shores around the world. I was astonished to discover that there are about 18000 in total, 60 in the UK, 700 in the USA and 45 in South Africa.



Perhaps the most famous and distinctive lighthouse in the world (and I am biased, here) sits at Cape Point, the rocky promontory at the southern end of the Cape Peninsula - and the southwestern-most point of the continent of Africa. The seas in this area are famously treacherous: there are no fewer than 26 shipwrecks around Cape Point itself.

Why is this lighthouse so notable? It certainly guards the choppy sea route around a continent but what makes it especially intriguing is that it was, initially, built in the wrong place. In 1850, The Victoria Foundry in London began construction of an iron lighthouse tower which was to sit 238 m above sea level on Cape Point Peak. The installation was arduous: the finished sections were landed by ship at nearby Buffels Bay and had to be hauled up to the site on sleds drawn by oxen. The light was eventually switched on 10 years later on May 1st 1860 and the authorities were convinced it would put an end to the appalling loss of ships on this critical route.
But...
What the designers failed to take into account was fog.
Not ordinary fog that blankets everything, but fog that rises and hangs only over the peaks of Cape Point, leaving the lower reaches clear but rendering the light on the peak invisible to passing ships. Sadly, the toll of shipwrecks continued and when, some 50 years later in 1911, the liner Lusitania with 700 on board struck Bellow's Rock and sank with the loss of 8 lives, a decision was made to abandon the original and build a new lighthouse lower down, below the cloud and fog level.
Would this resolve the issue?
Not quite... more next time!