Seashaken houses - Tom Nancollas

'A thrilling celebration of lighthouses' i newspaper

An enthralling history of Britain's rock lighthouses, and the people who built and inhabited them

Lighthouses are enduring monuments to our relationship with the sea.
They encapsulate a romantic vision of solitary homes amongst the waves,
but their original purpose was much more noble, conceived as
navigational gifts for the safety of all. Still today, we depend upon
their guiding lights for the safe passage of ships. Nowhere is this
truer than in the rock lighthouses of Great Britain and Ireland: twenty
towers built between 1811 and 1904, so-called because they were
constructed on desolate, slippery rock formations in the middle of the
sea, rising, mirage-like, straight out of the waves, with lights shining
at the their summits.

Seashaken Houses is a
lyrical exploration of these magnificent, isolated sentinels, the
ingenuity of those who conceived them, the people who risked their lives
building and rebuilding them, those that inhabited their circular
rooms, and the ways in which we value emblems of our history in a
changing world.