Anvil Point
by Ken Trethewey
[Anvil Point, Ken Trethewey, 2002]
Anvil Point is situated in Durlston Country Park, a delightful coastal reserve close to and just south of Swanage in Dorset. The lighthouse is little known and visitors need to travel first to Swanage and then to look for signs to the Park, which is about 2 km (1.5 miles) from the town centre. Swanage is best approached from Wareham, itself a beautiful town with severe traffic congestion. Once you are in the main street of Swanage, a small waterfront town with a lovely beach and harbour, the signposts to the Country Park are readily seen leading uphill away from the water.
There is a car park of good size (pay and display) with picnicking facilities and a modern visitor centre. However, don't expect to buy any lighthouse souvenirs, for the centre is focused on local wildlife. The lighthouse features in some of the displays, but there is no information of any kind about its history - another sad testament to English tourism that has everything - and nothing!
To get to the lighthouse follow the tarmac road along the cliff to the west. The narrow road is in reasonable condition and the distance to the lighthouse is less than 1 km, although there is a steep hill to be faced coming back. The cliffs on which it is built are part of a superb stretch of coastline, culminating in Durlston Head. The location is popular with tourists and besides the lighthouse itself, there are many other grand sights to view, best seen by tourist boat from Swanage, of course.
The height of the lighthouse tower is only 12 m since the cliffs provide all the elevation that the light requires for the current range of 24 miles. The overall design of the station is along the lines of many others - a square boundary wall containing the main tower at the front with accommodation buildings attached in line across the rear, and outbuildings integral to the boundary wall. Once, there would have been well-cultivated gardens in this enclosure, stocked with all manner of fresh produce. Today, it is at least tidy, rather than overgrown.
The fog signal is of brick construction and built into the boundary wall directly in front of the tower and, unlike the remainder of the station, has no white surface coating. It incorporates a number of Tannoy speakers.
[Anvil Point, Ken Trethewey, 2002]
The station is, as far as I could tell, essentially unchanged over recent decades. I found it in excellent condition, even to the extent that I could imagine a full complement of keepers and their families living here, as they did when I last visited in 1986. However, the lighthouse is now automatic and attended which means that a human may or may not live on site and is normally - maintenance work permitting - at liberty to allow visitors. This casual approach, coupled with the fact that no money is paid to the attendant for the entertainment of visitors, means that you are entirely at the whim of the attendant as to whether the station is opened for visitors or not. It is possible that the attendant does not live on site, but my own guess is that he does. On the occasion of my visit, a delightful Friday afternoon in early September, the lighthouse was closed. Fortunately, I have visited this lighthouse in the past so my collection contains internal photographs. The optic is, I believe, the same one that I have already photographed, and the light flashes continually, 24 hours per day.
From the point of view of photography, afternoon visitors are always facing into bright light from the roadway so photographs are invariably poor because of the silhouette effect of backlighting on the station. Once you are on the cliffs, good photographs are to be obtained from the west, although a particular feature is that most of the close angles are at quite low level and the high boundary wall is constantly obscuring the view. Even moving away from the lighthouse, the angles are not ideal and little advantage is to be gained by climbing the hill to the west.
On the east side, the cliffs fall sharply away, into a valley leading down to a set of caves, but the lighthouse becomes essentially invisible at this low level. Obviously, an early morning visit is likely to lead to the best photographs from this angle.
Copyright 2002 Ken Trethewey; all rights reserved.
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Posted August 12, 2005. Site copyright 2005 Russ Rowlett and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.