Eddystone Rocks
- Not to be confused with Eddystone Rock, Falkland Islands
The Eddystone, or the Eddystone Rocks, are a seaswept and heavily eroded group of rocks situated some 9 statute miles south-west of Rame Head in Cornwall, at SX383336.
These have long been a treacherous hazard for ships in the approaches to the English Channel and those sailing for the port city of Plymouth, and for this reason four lighthouses have been built here in succession. The Eddystone Lighthouse of today stands beside the stub of its immediate predecessor.[1]
The nearest point on the mainland to the Eddystone is in Cornwall, though the rocks are attributed in civic terms to the City of Plymouth.
Lighthouses
- Main article: Eddystone Lighthouse
There have been four lighthouses on the Eddystone Rocks. The Winstanley lighthouse (two versions; the second however just replaced the top of the structure), those by Rudyard, then Smeaton and finally the Douglass Lighthouse, which is the present one. When the Douglass Lighthouse was completed the people of Plymouth, grateful for the countless lives which had been saved since the introduction of the lighthouses, paid for the dismantling of the Smeaton Lighthouse from the red rocks of Eddystone and reassembly at Plymouth Hoe, where it is a popular tourist attraction today.
A traditional sea-shanty "The Eddystone Light" chronicles a fictional encounter between the lighthouse keeper and a mermaid. The Seekers, the Weavers, and Peter, Paul and Mary have recorded the shanty.
Geology
The rock of Eddystone is something of an anomaly in the geology of the south-western counties; it is composed of garnetiferous gneissic rock which is part of a considerable underwater outcrop of mica-schists and granitoid gneisses which have not been found elsewhere in the West Country.
Isotopic ages suggest that the last period of deformation was during the end of the Devonian, but their highly metamorphosed state indicates they likely have an older ancestry, a relic of earlier tectonic activity, probably of Precambrian age.[2]
Outside links
- Location map: 50°10’53"N, 4°15’58"W
References
- ↑ Eddystone Lighthouse - Trinity House
- ↑ Dewey, Henry (1975). British Regional Geology, South-West England. British Geological Survey. ISBN 0-11-880713-7.