Lighthouses

Britain's highest lighthouse by station yet among its shortest towers — a stubby light on the limestone headland above Brixham that needs no great height.

Devon

Set where the Atlantic meets the Bristol Channel on a fierce north Devon headland, above cliffs that have wrecked ships for centuries.

Devon

The southernmost point of mainland Britain, its twin octagonal towers guarding the western approach to the English Channel since 1751.

Cornwall

Stands on Carn Bras rock a mile off Land's End, its beam sweeping the graveyard of shipping at Britain's south-western tip.

Cornwall

Lundy's first lighthouse of 1819, set so high on the island's spine that its beam was often lost above the fog it was meant to pierce.

Devon

A whitewashed light on the cliffs of Cornwall's old tin coast, warning ships off the reefs between Land's End and St Ives.

Cornwall

Smeaton's 1759 Eddystone tower, its granite courses modelled on an oak trunk — dismantled and rebuilt on Plymouth Hoe once the reef undermined its foundations.

Devon

Set on Zone Point at the mouth of Falmouth's great natural harbour, and known to a generation as the lighthouse in the children's series Fraggle Rock.

Cornwall

Set back on the cliffs above the Norfolk resort, its light warning coasters off the sandbanks of a shore long plagued by wrecks.

Norfolk

Fourth and current tower on a treacherous reef nine miles off Plymouth, where five lighthouses in succession have battled the open Channel since 1698.

A white chalk-headland tower on the Yorkshire coast, its 1806 predecessor still standing nearby as one of England's oldest surviving lighthouses.

East Riding of Yorkshire

From this red-and-white Farne Islands tower Grace Darling and her keeper father rowed out to rescue survivors of the wrecked Forfarshire in 1838.

Northumberland

Stood on Suffolk's lonely shingle spit beside the secret Cold War test sites, until coastal erosion forced its demolition in 2020.

Suffolk

High on the Dover cliffs where Michael Faraday trialled electric lighting in 1858 and Marconi sent the first ship-to-shore radio message in 1898.

Kent

Rises on Spurn's shifting sand spit, marking the mouth of the Humber at the end of a three-mile peninsula that the sea remakes with every storm.

East Riding of Yorkshire

A wave-swept granite tower on a fanged reef between Land's End and the Scillies, named for the howl the sea once made through its gullies.

Stands on the true northernmost point of mainland Britain, above red sandstone cliffs looking across the Pentland Firth to Orkney.

Highland

Its three keepers vanished without trace in December 1900, a Hebridean mystery of the sea that has never been explained.

Na h-Eileanan Siar

A remote clifftop light on the Kintyre peninsula's southern tip, reached by a steep road down towards the North Channel and the Antrim coast.

Argyll and Bute

Alan Stevenson's graceful granite tower off Tiree, at 48 metres the tallest lighthouse in Scotland, raised on a lonely Atlantic reef in 1844.

Argyll and Bute

Sits on the volcanic plug in the Firth of Forth whose slopes turn white each summer with the world's largest colony of northern gannets.

East Lothian

Robert Stevenson's masterpiece of 1811, the world's oldest surviving sea-washed tower, built on a reef off Arbroath that submerges at every high tide.

Its light and rabbit-warren island in the Forth are said to have inspired Robert Louis Stevenson's map for Treasure Island.

East Lothian

Above the cliffs of St Abb's Head on the Berwickshire coast, standing over a national nature reserve thick with breeding seabirds.

Scottish Borders

A square red-and-white striped tower, the tallest square-tower lighthouse in the UK, on the holy island off the tip of the Llyn Peninsula.

Gwynedd

A disused cast-iron tower stranded on the sands at Talacre, the oldest surviving lighthouse in Wales, at the mouth of the Dee estuary.

Flintshire

A red-and-white light on a cluster of rocky islets off Anglesey, the last privately owned lighthouse in Britain until Trinity House bought it in 1841.

Anglesey

A black-and-white tower standing in the water off Penmon at Anglesey's eastern tip, tolling a bell to warn ships off the Menai Strait.

Anglesey

A disused light on Llanddwyn Island, a tidal spit off Anglesey linked to Dwynwen, the Welsh patron saint of lovers.

Anglesey

A wave-washed tower 20 miles off Pembrokeshire, scene of a grim 1801 ordeal when one of two keepers died and the survivor kept watch beside the body.

Pembrokeshire

On a Pembrokeshire headland at the entrance to Milford Haven, the most sheltered deep-water anchorage in Wales.

Dale

Marks a rocky Pembrokeshire headland on the ferry approach to Fishguard, its light set on a small island crossed by a footbridge.

Fishguard

On the Bristol Channel island where Marconi sent the first wireless message over the sea in 1897, its light covering the approaches to Cardiff.

Cardiff

One of a pair of towers raised on the Glamorgan coast after the paddle steamer Frolic was lost on the offshore sands in 1831.

Vale of Glamorgan