The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 158

Life on the rock (from previous page) hen, ON boxing day 1900, a light-keeper called Joseph Moore climbed the stairs to reach Flannan Isles lighthouse, a lonely tower 20 miles to the west of the Outer Hebrides, he discovered one of those mysteries that sells newspapers. It was empty: beds unmade, fire unlit, its lens, in breach of regulation, undraped and, downstairs, an uneaten meal of cold meat and boiled potatoes. Reporters, offered many explanations, doubtless added some of their own. One theory had a keeper killing his companions and then, in a fit of remorse, throwing his body after theirs into the sea. Others speculated that the men had been consumed by a sea serpent, or carried off by a giant sea bird, or kidnapped by foreign agents.

The official conclusion was that they had gone to a landing to secure equipment and were washed away by a freak wave -although this did not prevent Gibson, in his poem The Flannan Isles, from hinting at another fate for the keepers: that they had been transformed into 'three queer, black, ugly birds'. As Marie Celeste-genre mysteries go, this is a good one, for it draws power from the bleak resonance of the idea of the empty lighthouse. Peculiarly, an unmanned lighthouse offends in the distinct ways at a deserted sentry post and an abandoned chapel do. We had better get used to the offence, however, for we are racing towards the end of the era of the manned lighthouse, an era that stretches at least to the erection of the Pharos of Alexandria in the 3rd century BC. Of the British Isles' 345 lighthouses only 32 are now manned, and only nine of these are rock lighthouses, those archetypal off-shore towers where the men (and they are all men) have only each other, the sea and the sky for company.

There is no mystery attached to this depopulation to rival the Flannan Isles' conundrum. Men are expensive; when the technology of remote control permitted, the ship owners who paid for the service demanded the most obvious of cuts. The monsters who will have done for every light-houseman on these islands by the end of the 1997-98 financial year are the bland electronic acronyms Radar, Racon and Decca. The keepers of the flame are merely enduring a leisurely Wapping. The 'night on a lighthouse' story is thus one of those journalistic perennials that will be soon be perennial no longer, which is probably why Theresa Griffiths of the heritage show One Foot In The Past wanted to make a film about Mew Island, one of Ireland's two remaining offshore lights.

(It will be shown on Tuesday on BBC2 at 9.30pm.) It is certainly why I wanted to visit Mew after she told me about it. If I didn't check out the romantic myth of the lighthouse against reality now, I never would. six MEN MAN the Mew, but only three at any one time. The trio who greet us when we arrive by boat from the pebble-dashed fishing village of Donaghadee in County Down are the principal keeper, Eugene O'SuIlivan, who is 53, a small, scantily thatched bachelor who reminds me (physically) of Paul Daniels, and his two assistants: AI Hamilton, 45, a father of two daughters, whose present tour of duty will be his last, and Vincent Hedderman, aged 42, another family man. All three are Catholics, an eccentric distribution of labour for Northern Ireland explained by the fact that, in a rare piece of cross-bordering, all 85 lights in the 32 counties are run from Dublin.

As it happens one of the crew currently on shore leave is a Protestant, but his faith does not seem to be an issue. The real division is between those whose families worked the lights and those whose forebears did not. Vincent, agree Eugene and Al, is a good worker but, as a first-generation keeper, he doesn't really understand the lights in the way they do. Al and Eugene, both of whose brothers also entered the service, stand at the end of four generations of lighthousemen. The kitchen, in which we are offered tea and in which Willie, our boatman, makes a start on the bottle of whiskey he has bought on the strength of our fare, is a wood and linoleum affair familiar to anyone who has rented a seaside home.

At one end is a gas cooker, at the other a television, and in the middle a formica table. The only thing remotely decorative, unless you count a wall chart of lobsters and squid, is a model-boat. An electric wall clock, its face disfigured by the enlarged numerals favoured by graphic designers in the 1970s, ticks away towards the expiry dates The monsters who will have done for every lighthouseman on these islands by the end of the 1997-8 financial year, are the bland electronic acronyms, Radar, Racon and Decca. The keepers of the flame are merely enduring a leisurely Wapping Top: Vincent Hedderman inspects the Mew island lens at dawn. Above: Al Hamilton (middle) describes the lighthouse as 'a little community' on the canisters of flares facing it: 697, although Mew will have closed as a manned station before that, in March 1996.

The lighthouseman of legend is half hermit, half hero. We admire him both for his stoicism in enduring his own company amid Matthew Arnold's 'unplumbed, salt, estranging sea' and for his daring entries into community life in which he rescues those whom the sea seeks to claim. In Lighthouses And Lightships: A Descriptive And Historical Account Of Their Mode Of Construction And Organisation, published in 1875, WH Davenport perpetuates both sides of the legend. He calls the keeper's vocation a 'high and holy service' and says it is characterised by 'an austere regularity which reminds one of the existence formerly led in grotto and cavern by saint and hermit, although its end is far more Some keepers, he says, 'have gone mad, or nearly so, by dint of contemplating the same external impressions', and he cites a Longships lighthouseman who thrust a knife into his breast in 1862 in a fit of temporary insanity, concluding: 'Perhaps it is not so It now needed only Grace Darling, daughter of the keeper of the Longstone lighthouse off Northumberland, to shore up the other end of the myth, and Davenport duly retells her story. In 1838, aged 22, she became famous for helping her father row out to rescue nine survivors from the wreck of a steamer: 'And through the sea's tremendous troughThe father and the girl rode as Wordsworth forgettably wrote.

Davenport neglects to say that when she died three years later from TB, Darling Snr blamed her decline on 'anxiety of mind because so many ladies and gentlemen came to see her that she got no rest'. These are the ennobling legends that a still seafaring 20 LIFE 24 JULY 1994.