The white tower on a rocky island off St Ives that Virginia Woolf watched as a child and turned into her novel To the Lighthouse
Godrevy Lighthouse stands on a small rocky island at the eastern edge of St Ives Bay in Cornwall, a white tower that you see across the water long before you reach it. Trinity House, the lighthouse authority, built it in 1859 to warn ships off the Stones, a low reef running out from the island that had wrecked plenty of vessels over the years. The light still works, automated now, and still marks that reef.
The tower’s real fame is literary. Virginia Woolf spent childhood summers with her family in St Ives and looked out at Godrevy across the bay, and years later it became the far-off lighthouse of her novel To the Lighthouse, even though she moved the story’s setting to Scotland. Once you have seen it sitting out there on its own, small and pale against the sea, you can understand why it stuck with her.
You cannot land on the island, so this is a place to view rather than visit. The usual spot is Godrevy Head on the mainland, reached from the National Trust car parks behind the beach, where the South West Coast Path runs along the cliffs and gives you the classic view out to the tower. The long sweep of sand at Godrevy Towans is popular with surfers and families, and there is often a colony of grey seals hauled out in the cove below the headland. St Ives itself, with Tate St Ives, is a short drive round the bay.
