The keepers left in 1988 and the light runs itself. The lamp room log book on the shelf has an entry for every single day since, in ink, in the same hand.
I am a technician. I look after automated aids to navigation, which is the proper term and which mostly means lighthouses, buoys and racons on a stretch of coast.
Automated means what it says. The light is a lamp on a rotating pedestal with a photocell that switches it at dusk and a backup lamp on a changer that swings in if the first one fails, and a monitoring unit that phones home if anything is wrong. There is no keeper. There has not been a keeper at any station in this country since 1998 and at mine since 1988.
I visit twice a year for the scheduled service and whenever the monitoring throws a fault.
The tower I want to talk about is on a headland with a track up to it, gated, and I have the only set of keys on my patch. There is a second set in a safe at the depot and a third with the coastguard. That is all of them. The lock is a good one and it is not a lock anybody picks casually, and in fourteen years the gate has never been forced and the door has never been forced.
In the old days a keeper kept a log. Every watch, every day. Time the light was lit, time it was put out, the weather, the visibility, the state of the sea, anything passing, anything wrong.
There is a shelf in the lamp room, below the window, with the last of them on it: a hardback ledger with a red spine and feint ruling, about A4, the sort you could still buy in a stationer's.
I noticed it on my first visit in 2010 because I am nosy about old things and I opened it expecting the last entry to be from 1988, which is when the station was automated and the keepers came off.
The last entry was from the previous Thursday.
Here is what the entries look like, and I have photographed a great many of them.
A date. A time, usually two or three times in the day. And a short line in a small, square, very regular hand.
"0710 light out. Clear, wind SW 3, vis good."
"2038 light lit. Overcast, wind veering W 4."
"1145 Fishing vessel W to E, close in, red hull."
That is exactly what a keeper's log looks like. It is not spooky writing. It is the least dramatic prose in the world and that is what makes it hard to sit with.
There is an entry for every day. Not most days. Every day, going back to the eleventh of August 1988, which is the day the keepers left, and forward to whenever I happen to be standing there.
I did the counting once, badly, over two visits, and then properly with a colleague who thought I was winding him up until he was halfway through.
Thirteen thousand and some entries across nine ledgers. The ledgers are the same make and the shelf now has all nine on it, in order, and when one fills up the next one starts on the next day with no gap.
Where the new ones come from I do not know. They are not a make you can buy now. I checked, because that felt like the sort of thing that would end it, and the stationer's that supplied them stopped trading in 2004 and the manufacturer stopped making that binding in the nineties.
The ink is the same all through. A blue-black, the sort out of a bottle.
The handwriting does not change. Not over thirty-six years. I have had two people look at that who know about handwriting, informally, as a favour, and both said the same thing in different words, which is that it is one hand and it is not aging.
The entries are correct.
That is the part that took me longest to accept, because I had assumed for about three years that somebody was getting in and doing it as a joke, and a joke does not need to be right.
I have checked the weather entries against the met records for the station eleven miles up the coast for two hundred and six days spread over thirty years. They agree. Not vaguely. Wind direction to the point, sea state, visibility, and on the days there was fog there is fog in the book.
I have checked the lighting times against sunset and sunrise. They agree, allowing for the photocell, which fires a bit before and after depending on cloud.
And I have checked the vessel entries against AIS for the last decade, which is the one that made me stop sleeping properly for a while, because AIS is a public record with a timestamp and a hull and a heading, and where the book says a coaster went east at 1420 there is a coaster going east at 1420.
I want to put down the two things I have done that I would not do again.
The first is that in 2016 I took a ledger away. The current one, off the shelf, into my bag, down the track, into my van, and home. I had it for nine days on my kitchen table.
There were no new entries in it while I had it. Nothing appeared. It sat there being a book.
I took it back on the tenth day and put it on the shelf and stood there, and I opened it, and the nine days I had been away were all in it, in order, in ink, in that hand, with the right weather.
The second is that in 2019 I stayed the night.
I have keys and I had a reason on the paperwork, a monitoring fault I was chasing, and I sat in the lamp room from about eight in the evening until half past six the next morning with a torch and a flask and my back against the wall where I could see the shelf and the door at the same time.
Nothing came in. Nothing happened. I did not sleep, and I am not going to claim I did not blink.
At about ten past seven, when it was properly light, the light went out on its photocell the way it does, and I got up because my legs had gone, and I looked at the book.
The last entry said: "0712 light out. Clear, wind NW 2, vis good. Technician in lamp room overnight, no fault found."
I did not report it. I want to be honest about why.
The station is a machine that has to work. It is on a headland that has taken ships. If I put it in writing that there is something in that tower, the response is not a scientist with instruments, it is a manager who has to decide whether I am fit to hold the keys, and the keys are how the light stays lit.
So the log stays on the shelf, and I read it, and twice a year I do my service and I sign my own sheet, which is a completely different piece of paper that goes back to the depot.
There is one thing I have started doing.
I write in it.
Only my own visits, only what I actually did, in the same format, dated and timed, because it felt rude not to. Just: "1030 arrived. Lamp changer serviced, backup tested. 1420 departed."
And underneath, in the other hand, on the same day, every time now:
"Technician up. All well."
I have decided that is not a threat, and I have had six years to decide it, and it is the only thing about any of this that I have ever found comfortable.