Pendeen Lighthouse (Pendeen Watch)

1900

3 October 1900

United Kingdom

Trinity House

1st order

Revolving

Active

Fl(4) W 15s Range 16 nautical miles

Concrete rubblestone tower 17 metres high painted white with balcony and lantern. There is an E shaped building attached to the tower split into four cottages. The lighthouse and cottages are all Grade II listed buildings along with the other accompanying buildings and boundary walls.

Foghorn, five–wick Argand lamp.

Trinity House decided to build a lighthouse and foghorn here in 1891 to guide shipping around the ricky coastline from Pendeen to Gurnards Head. The building was designed by Sir Thomas Matthews and constructed by Arthur Carkeek of Redruth in Cornwall.

A five wick Argand lamp was provided by Chance Brothers of Smethwick near Birmingham however this was soon replaced by a Matthews 3-50 diameter mantle lamp. Chance Brothers also manufactured the lens system which was a large first order rotating optic made up of two sets of four panels which displayed a group of four flashes every fifteen seconds. This lens still remain in use today. The original Argand oil lamp was on display at the Trinity House National Lighthouse Museum, Penzance, until 2005 when the museum closed.

The fog signal was sounded from a detached engine house a little to the north-west. In 1900 it contained a pair of Hornsby oil engines providing compressed air for the twin 5-inch sirens, which sounded a seven-second blast every one-and-a-half minutes, through vertical curved trumpets (still in place) on the engine room roof. In 1926 Pendeen was the first Trinity House station to be fitted with a new, more powerful 12-inch siren. This was part of a general upgrade to the lighthouse, which saw new Gardner semi-diesel engines installed in the engine house and an electric filament lamp replacing the petroleum vapour light in the lantern. Pendeen was one of the first Trinity House lighthouses to be equipped with an incandescent light bulb: 'in order to obviate a watch being kept during fog both in the engine room and the lantern, electric light has been introduced in place of the petroleum-vapour lamps and the apparatus in the lantern made automatic'. The electric current was generated by dynamos directly coupled to another set of semi-diesel engines. The lamp used was an Osram gas-filled bulb, specially designed for Trinity House by the General Electric Company. The automated equipment included a turntable lamp changer: in the event of a lamp failure, a reserve bulb was brought into position and lit (and an alarm notified the keeper), and if the reserve bulb then failed, it was replaced by a self-lighting acetylene lamp; the system remained in use until the mid-1990s. In the engine house, the Gardners were replaced by a pair of Ruston & Hornsby diesels in 1963.

Pendeen was electrified in 1995 and the keepers left in May of that year. A new electric lamp was provided but as previously stated the original Chance optic is still in situ. As part of the preparation for automation the fog siren was decommissioned and replaced with an electric fog signal, sounding once every 20 seconds; (The fog signal was decommissioned in April 2014).

Trinity House

Trinity House

Open

Closed

50.164967 N, 5.671592 W

1. Two cottages, Solebay and Argus are available to book via Rural Retreats +44 (0)1386 701177 https://www.trinityhouse.co.uk/lighthouse-cottage-rental/pendeen-holiday-cottages
2. https://www.trinityhouse.co.uk/lighthouses-and-lightvessels/pendeen-lighthouse
3. https://www.ibiblio.org/lighthouse/engsw.htm

There is minimal parking near the lighthouse though it can be reached by walking along the coast path.

ARLHS ENG-100; Admiralty A5670; NGA 6304.