A big switch-over for our Manx lighthouses

Anna Grau - 

Big changes are planned to the way the island’s seven lighthouses are monitored.

It’s a move that will alter the historic link between the Isle of Man and the Northern Lighthouse Board, a link that goes back nearly 200 years.

The board is responsible for seven lighthouses in and around the Isle of Man, ranging from Point of Ayre in the north to the treacherous Chicken Rock off the Calf of Man in the south.

They are now all fully automated, the last to become so being the Langness light in 1996. The lights are visited every year for store supply deliveries and maintenance by the board’s ship, the NLV Pharos.

Last year, the UK Government published the Atkins Review that looked at the provision of marine aids to navigation around the British Isles and Ireland.

One of its 52 recommendations concerned the way in which the lighthouses of all three General Lighthouse Authorities (Trinity House, Irish Lights and the Northern Lighthouse Board) are remotely monitored.

It concluded that savings could be made by monitoring all the lighthouses from one central monitoring centre.

Currently, operations have been monitored by the parent General Lighthouse Authority by 24-hour monitor centres in Harwich in Essex, Dun Laoghaire near Dublin, Republic of Ireland, and Edinburgh, Scotland.

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