Berry Head
by Ken Trethewey
[Berry Head, Ken Trethewey, 2002]
Having made the effort to visit Teignmouth so late in the afternoon, it was a great effort to travel the short distance to Berry Head, simply because of the time of day - the rush hour - combined with the fact that the weather was poor, the light was fading fast, and it could rain heavily at any moment. It became a race against time and was executed with significant frustration.
Berry Head is located on the south side of Brixham harbour, a small and still active fishing village on the south-east Devon coast. The roads to it are poor and quite badly signposted. Indeed, when I came to leave I got quite lost, even though I have lived in the region for most of my life. I finished up at the Kingswear car ferry that crosses to Dartmouth, rather than on the road to Totnes. But that's another story.
When you get to Berry Head, it is quite a rewarding experience, for the panoramas are breathtaking, even in poor weather. The locality has been designated as a country park complete with early 19th century fortifications, country walks and pleasant tourist cafes. It still amazes me that in my 52 years of life I had never visited this place which is but 30 miles from my family home, for it is a truly splendid attraction.
The lighthouse does not have a high profile, yet it is a major light on this coast. I can state categorically that it is the smallest true lighthouse in the country, and it would be hard to imagine a shorter one anywhere. The Admiralty List gives the height of the lighthouse as 5 metres. It seemed a lot less than that.
When I arrived, I had to park in the car park before setting out on a walk through the park. I did not know where the lighthouse was situated, but found it by turning to the right, through the fortified area and then heading out towards the cliff edge where there was an obvious radio transmission station. When I saw the lighthouse, I was shocked to see it surrounded with scaffolding, and one of those horrible little plastic navigational lights mounted on the roof of the lighthouse building. This, of course, is the emergency back-up, but it did look really out-of-place, its proportions being wrong on such a small lighthouse. When I arrived closer, I realised that the tiny lighthouse tower, which can only be barely 3 metres tall in its entirety - with the optic itself at eye-level - remained intact and fully functional. I suppose the scaffolding represented a recent period of renovation for which I should feel pleased, but I was just a little annoyed to find the unsightly scaffolding spoiling my photographs. Well, the weather wasn't very good so what did it matter? I would just have to come back another day.
The station is a complete lighthouse station with all its outbuildings intact. Surrounding it was a very effective wrought iron fence of the kind that would cause serious injury if you tried to climb over it, and inside of this was a well-kept gravel premises with an access door on each side of the main building and a further separate building at the rear. This lighthouse too has been the subject of many popular picture postcards dating from the time it was built in 1906 under the auspices of Sir Thomas Matthews. Its design is quite unique and must have its own stories to tell, if it could. Mine is simple. I came, I saw, I went home.
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.