Bamburgh Lighthouse (also known as Black Rocks Point Lighthouse) was built by

Trinity House "Three In One" , formation = , founding_location = Deptford, London, England , status = Royal Charter corporation and registered charity , purpose = Maintenance of lighthouses, buoys and beacons , he ...

in 1910 to guide shipping both passing along the Northumberland coast and in the waters around the

Farne Islands The Farne Islands are a group of islands off the coast of Northumberland, England. The group has between 15 and 20 islands depending on the level of the tide.

. It was extensively modernised in 1975 and is now monitored from the Trinity House Operations and Planning Centre in

Harwich Harwich is a town in Essex, England, and one of the Haven ports on the North Sea coast. It is in the Tendring district. Nearby places include Felixstowe to the north-east, Ipswich to the north-west, Colchester to the south-west and Clacton-on- ...

. Routine maintenance is carried out by a local attendant. It is the most northerly land-based

lighthouse A lighthouse is a tower, building, or other type of physical structure designed to emit light from a system of lamps and lenses and to serve as a beacon for navigational aid, for maritime pilots at sea or on inland waterways. Lighthouses mar ...

in England. When originally built, the lamp was mounted on a -high skeletal steel tower (the footprint of which can still be seen within the compound) which stood alongside the white building which housed an

acetylene Acetylene (systematic name: ethyne) is the chemical compound with the formula and structure . It is a hydrocarbon and the simplest alkyne. This colorless gas is widely used as a fuel and a chemical building block. It is unstable in its pure ...

plant to power the lamp. (A similar arrangement can be seen today at Peninnis Lighthouse in the

Isles of Scilly The Isles of Scilly (; kw, Syllan, ', or ) is an archipelago off the southwestern tip of Cornwall, England. One of the islands, St Agnes, is the most southerly point in Britain, being over further south than the most southerly point of the ...

.) The lamp was mounted within a fixed third-order dioptric optic. It was a

sector light A sector light is a man-made pilotage and position fixing aid that consists of strictly delineated horizontal angle light beams to guide water-borne traffic through a safe channel at night in reasonable visibility. Sector lights are most often u ...

with a group occulting characteristic (showing two eclipses every 15 seconds). The light was electrified in 1967. Diesel generators were installed in the (redundant) acetylene building. In 1975 the tower was removed, and a new lantern and lens were installed on top of the old acetylene building. In the 1980s the lighthouse was connected to

mains electricity Mains electricity or utility power, power grid, domestic power, and wall power, or in some parts of Canada as hydro, is a general-purpose alternating-current (AC) electric power supply. It is the form of electrical power that is delivered to h ...

, the generators being retained as a standby provision.

References

General references

* {{Authority control Lighthouses in Northumberland Bamburgh