Spurn (Spurn Point)

There have been a number of lighthouses marking the extremity of Spurn Head – the sandy spit curving into the Humber Estuary. The most recent was built by Thomas Matthews and completed in 1895. The preceding main light on Spurn had been built by John Smeaton, more famous for building the third Eddystone Lighthouse in 1759. Smeaton’s tower had worked in conjunction with a Low Light (built on the inside of the spit in 1852), but the 1895 tower rendered both these lights obsolete, as Matthews’ tower included two subsidiary lights lower down the tower.

The elevation of Matthews’ tower was 120ft, originally powered by an incandescent lamp, the lighthouse was converted to electricity during the Second World War – taking its supply for the nearby Army base. During the early 1950s, the light source was a 500 Watt lamp, but when the lighthouse was automated in 1957, the electricity supply could still be intermittent, so an Acetylene lamp was installed. The 1895 optic was removed, most of it destroyed on site, with many locals schoolboys scavenging bits of prism as treasures. The last fulltime keeper, Graham Fearn managed to salvage one of the bull’s eye lenses, which he turned into a mirror. The new optic was a Swedish Dalen PR130 third order unit made by the AGA company.

Spurn Lighthouse was discontinued in 1985 and the Dalen Optic eventually went to the Trinity House National Lighthouse Centre in Penzance, Cornwall, where it was on display from 1990 until the Centre closed in 2005.

In 2018 a new Discovery Centre was built at Spurn Point, that saw some lighthouse artifacts donated to the Centre, among them a section of prism and the original brass plaque from the 1895 optic. Sadly Graham Fearn died in 2018, but his family donated the old Spurn optic bull’s eye to the Association of Lighthouse Keepers, who in turn loaned it to the Discovery Centre, where it is now on display.