The Last Sweeping Beams

Available for 23 days

Helen Mort explores the allure of lighthouses, as one by one their sweeping beams are turned off. Lighthouse optic lenses are things of beauty, their concentric glass prisms refracting light into a powerful beam that sweeps across the sea. But these lights need to evolve over the next decade to remain fit for purpose – the reliance on mercury in the rotating system is hazardous; the new LED lights can be powered by solar. The rotating, sweeping beam is replaced by a flash, which reports suggest look largely the same to the mariner at sea, but as each lighthouse has its lens mechanism overhauled, the people who live around them notice the difference and many mourn the change. Some of the romance of lighthouses has already been stripped away in reality – they were automated through the 1980s and 1990s, so there are no manned lighthouses now. Working lighthouses are becoming an endangered species, as they are decommissioned to become tearooms and holiday lets. But they remain iconic structures, and an enduring source of fascination for poets. In 'The Last Sweeping Beams' Helen meets those who have felt a lifelong pull towards the hypnotic sweep of their lights. For Edward Peppitt, the beam from Dungeness lighthouse passing along his bedroom wall as a child led to an obsession with lighthouses, culminating in a 3,500-mile cycle ride to visit every onshore and offshore lighthouse around England and Wales, despite a diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis. Helen talks to Emma Stonex, author of 'The Lamplighters', who immersed herself in the lives of lighthouse keepers in researching her book, which revisits the story of the vanishing of three keepers from a Scottish lighthouse in 1900. It's a story also told in Wilfrid Wilson Gibson's poem 'Flannan Isle', and a mystery still unsolved. Poet Glyn Maxwell explores the significance of the lighthouse beam in his mentor Derek Walcott's poem 'The Lighthouse', and writer Joe Moran explains his fascination with the iconic structures: the warning light reaching out to invisible others is a concrete symbol of our common humanity, of the fact that people we may never meet are also our concern. At the heart of the programme, a new poem by Helen reflects on the lives that used to be spent in lighthouses, and explores the meaning of the sweeping light that has been sent out to sea for centuries. With location recordings made at Portland Bill Lighthouse, Dorset Producer: Megan Jones Sound design: Catherine Robinson A BBC Audio Wales production for Radio 4