Episode 55 - North Queensferry Harbour Light

0:00 Hi everyone, I'm Emily. And I'm Vince. And this is the lighthouse low down. He's very midwest of you. Yeah, he sprinkled in a little bit of an unknown accent in there. Could be anywhere. So today, Vince and I are moving this month and it's taking up a large majority of our time. So we're going to make this a mini episode. So there's no history buoy. And hopefully it'll just be like a little info nugget for our listeners. A little short-a-soad. Yeah, short-a-soad. Nice one. Very clever. So I decided to choose a mini lighthouse for a mini episode.

0:43 A mini. It's a mini. How mini? Allegedly the smallest light, smallest working light tower in the world. Oh, cool. But I know of towers that are lit and are shorter. So there's got to be some very specific rule to the word working and light tower and not lighthouse. It's got like some clockwork that's still going or something. It's... I don't know what the answer is, but there's some sort of stipulation where they use that wording very specifically in order to claim that title. Someone knows the answer somewhere. Yeah. We're going international for this lighthouse.

1:23 We're heading to North Queens Ferry, Scotland, which is very close to the capital of Scotland, Edinburgh. Is this the first Scottish lighthouse we've done? No. Hang on. You might have done one a long time ago. I pull up a map. I think it's our map. Yeah, we got our little dots on there. So we did... it's funny. You can kind of see the ones we've already covered. Little Ross. Is that Scotland? Okay. No, it's south of Scotland. The border. Oh, we got Flannan Eye. Oh, yeah. I think that's Scotland. So we're going to zoom in here to Edinburgh. My dad studied abroad there. For medical? Before that, I think. Here's Queens Ferry.

2:03 We're zooming in. Fourth Bridge, North Queens Ferry, and our light. Deep Sea. Sea World. It's right here. So as you can see, we're very close to Edinburgh. So you can imagine this little... it's a little channel of water called the Firth of Forth. The what? The Firth of Forth. Apparently Firth... You say that like, oh, come on, Vince. You know, the Firth of Forth. I just repeat it. The fifth, the fifth. The fifth of the fifth. Apparently Firth is a type of water channel or something. Okay.

2:43 Like fjord, but for water, if I remember correctly. So the Firth of Forth is just the name of this channel. Oh, of the Forth area. Forth Bridge. Yeah. Yeah. So Queens Ferry is split up in the north and south on either side of this channel. So north is the one that we're looking at today is North Queens Ferry Harbor Light. Nice. And there's a south Queens Ferry Harbor Light there. Kind of twins, but not really. What's that little thing? Is it a land bridge? A footbridge? I will talk about it. Okay. So the Firth of Forth was high traffic area, obviously, because you're getting from one side to the other of this channel. And there's a lot of people going into Edinburgh.

3:24 So there's a lot of people passing through this area. And back in the day, meaning like the 1700s, there were no bridges and you had to boat across, but the traffic was not regulated. So obviously it was like a death trap of boats. Just to get across. Although I'm sure like, I don't know anything about how many shipwrecks, but it was bad enough to where the government decided to step in. And May of 1809, they passed an Act of Parliament calling for major improvements to the Queens Ferry Passage, which is what this little area is called. So the Act created a public private partnership where the government and the trustees of Queens Ferry Passage, which is like a nonprofit organization or something.

4:08 I didn't dig too deep into it because this is a mini-soap. Short-a-soap. What did you call it? Short-a-soap. That's right. But they would split a 16 and a half thousand pound bill for changes to the passage, which at that time was like a little bit over $2 million, I think. So it's hefty. So the changes included regulating traffic. So they limited the number of boats that could be crossing at any time. You could only sail when you were signaled. There were no liquor sales anymore. I don't know the specifications of... On boats specifically? Yeah. I don't know if it was like you couldn't bring liquor from one side to the other or you couldn't sell it at the port or something. Although that would be important.

4:48 You wouldn't want drunkards sailing across in all the traffic, like driving drunk, but for a boat. Yeah. Not allowed. And the operation of the ferry was now to be run by a management committee, an engineer, a surveyor, treasurer, collector, receiver, a clerk, and two resident superintendents. Yeah, corporate. And they really beefed up the amount of supervision they had going on. Hold on. You said there was a public-private committee? Yeah. So it was the government combined with this nonprofit to pay and decide what kind of changes they needed to make. So it was basically just like a partnership. We've heard of a similar... I'm sure it's not the same people, but a similar group recently in some episode.

5:29 Really? Yeah. It was one of mine, I think, and I remember not really understanding... Was it Atlantic City? Public-private. Maybe. It might've been Atlantic City. Okay. And then some other changes is that at South Queens Ferry, there would be new piers at Long Craig and Port Edgar and improvements to the existing Hawes Pier, I think it's called. And a new road would link these piers and storage sheds, stables, and housing for boatmen would be constructed. Nice. Filling it up. At North Queens Ferry, the existing East Battery Pier was to be improved with new piers at West Battery, which was now called Town Pier and Long Craig Island. There were to be houses for boatmen, a house for superintendents, an inn, and a building to house offices and a waiting room.

6:11 And this building was called Mount Hooley, which is where our lighthouse begins. There's so much development as part of this. Yeah, I know. They really... I don't know how long... I think it was just a couple of years they did all of this. Kind of crazy. Lots of new piers. So Robert Stevenson, you know, the Stevenson family, we talked about him briefly for Little Ross because they built a lot of lighthouses around the UK and also like some in Japan and some in... They're scattered all over. I really need to do an episode that's all about the Stevenson family because they had generations of lighthouse engineers. So Robert Stevenson was approached by the trustees in 1812 to put a light at North Queens Ferry.

6:54 He suggested a lantern room be placed on the existing Mount Hooley staircase. So I have a picture of what that may have looked like. It's like a rendering of what it might have looked like at that time. This is Mount Hooley, this building, this orange building. And then this little copper domed lantern room. This is a rendering? Yeah. I couldn't find... This looks real as hell. I couldn't find Mount Hooley at all. And so I'm sure it's still there, but I couldn't find it on the map. But I saw an article and they just like put our little light tower on top of there to show what it looked like. Shocking. Yeah.

7:34 Shocking. Thick news. I'm pretty sure now it's right over here in front of this little white building. Yes. In the past, it was a lot taller than it is now. But in 1817, it was determined that this was not the optimum location for the light. So it was moved slightly and placed on top of a tiny tower built just across the street, which faced directly down the new town pier. So instead of being slightly off center, obviously you want boats to be approaching the pier exactly. But yeah, so they moved it down from what would seem like a more advantageous spot up high and instead put it very close to the ground facing downtown's pier. But it lined up. Yeah.

8:15 Okay. It's a beautiful area. Stonework and everything. So here's a really old map photo. And so you can see the light was placed over here and it faces perfectly down this town's pier. And you can see where they added West Battery Pier and East Battery Pier. We talked about those and got Coast Guard stations, watch houses, all kinds of fun stuff. Busy. They also mentioned, like I said earlier, there was a twin tower to this one at South Queens Ferry. Yeah. And it was on Hawes Pier, which was built at the same time. The South one was taken out of service in 1877, but it's still there. I didn't put in a picture of our slideshow, but you can look it up. It is not lit. Yeah.

8:56 It's boarded up. But the actual tower itself is still there. And it has some like cool- It's a renovation. Figures on it, like gargoyle type things. So a lot fancier than we got for the North Tower. Oh, and it's boarded up. Some favoritism going on. North Queens Ferry light, when it was moved, it became 16 feet tall and four feet wide with a little copper dome. Copper dome. Nice. What are those numbers under the word light? Maybe navigational coordinates or something. Okay. I have no idea. If you know out there, let us know. Yeah. Anyone who's watching on YouTube and can see this picture, let us know. Oh, no way.

9:36 I forgot about how awesome this is going to be. Yeah, you can see the bridge in the background, which is, I'll cover briefly, but that's fourth bridge. And it's actually a railroad. It was a rail bridge and not a road bridge. It's a cool bridge. Hey, we have some flags. We have signal flags. I see that. Do you know what they're saying? I wish I had it pulled up. I could see what we got going on. I want to say the blue and yellow is V, but that's my only guess. I can't corroborate your story. So there are three bridges that now cross this passage, one of them being the famous fourth bridge, which I talked about, built what? There's three bridges.

10:17 This one's the fourth. The first one built in 1890. It's right next to the tower and is a mile and a half long, locally known as our grand old lady. Well, yeah, I feel like that's a long bridge. I have a picture here of it when it was being built. So that's pretty cool. I don't have the details of how long it took or anything, but it was a railway and fourth road bridge was constructed in 1964. So now there's one that you can drive across and the construction of that bridge is what ended ferries going across the fourth. So now you drive or train or train. You train train train.

10:59 This image for those of you who aren't watching and just listening, it's like a sepia, black and white. It almost looks like a sketch, but I know it's a photograph. Yeah. Incredible structures they built. These I'm going to call them piers, these three piers, which are of course part of the final construction. And they're super tall. Of course it's a bridge, but they're also the final construction of the bridge goes up and down for like the arches, the structural supports. It's really neat. You could see on the side, these big X patterns. They're still, yeah, that's awesome. I can't believe it's still there. Yeah. From the age of that photo.

11:39 Yeah. 1890. Still operating. Well, they know how to build bridges. Yeah. They got it right. But when the road one was constructed in the sixties, it extinguished our North Queens ferry Harbor light. Some sources say that it was extinguished in 1890 when the railroad bridge was constructed by I think it said both. So I think it's referring to the road one and not the... I feel like you could use the rail bridge as a navigator. Yeah, that's true. If you're on a boat, but I don't know if it had lights on it or how often bridges were on it, how often trains were on it.

12:22 Yeah. Maybe they didn't even have lights on it at that time. Maybe it like lost a lot of its use, the lighthouse with the rail, but certainly with the ferry not running anymore. So the tower was renovated and reopened in 2010 and you can now climb the 24 steps to the light and it still has its Argon lamp, which it stuck with throughout its entire existence. Go back and listen to our second episode, history of lighthouses. I need more of that. I forgot about that. And the original is still in the tower to view if you climb and you can light the Argon lamp and receive a certificate of competence as an honorary keeper of the light. No way. So you become, it's like official.

13:02 I've never heard of that. Yeah. How neat is that? What are you saying? Argon? Argon. Can you remind me from our episode two? No. I'll have to go. I'll have to go listen to episode two to know what we said. That was my first episode. That was 50 episodes ago. So I need to brush up on my lamps. Wasn't that my first episode? Yes, it was. You're welcome everyone. We did the call in separate rooms because we would have echo with our current or with our old equipment. I was staring at a wall listening to you over the phone using headphones from work. Yeah, we did our best. We've really, we've really grown up. Here we are. Riprap.

13:43 What is this? Version three? Yeah. The studio. We're about to retire it. About to have version four. Riprap V4. I have a picky. This is the guy that takes care of the lighthouse right now. His name is Gary Irvine. I believe it's pronounced or Irvin. Gary. I love that jacket. A lot of the pictures that I've shown are actually his and I'll credit him on those. So you guys can check out his photography. He does photography and he takes care of this lighthouse. He's also a heritage trust secretary. So I didn't look too deep into that group, but I don't know what that means. You can see that vent stack though. We're talking about the Arden lamp. He's polishing the reflector right now.

14:24 The back of the reflector. Awesome. It was originally fueled by whale oil, changed to paraffin, then gas and now is run off vegetable oil. How progressive. I think at one point it said something about electricity, but right now it says vegetable oil. Maybe because it's not needed as a source. They went to electricity and now they're back to. Yeah. And I think they only light it upon request or something. So it's not like it's being lit every day. Really cool. That'd be so much fun. And if you pull this up on Google Maps, it shows us fourth bridges lighthouse museum, which I believe is not the tower itself, but a building that's just adjacent to it. It has the history of the bridge, history of town pier and also this light tower.

15:07 So you can just go, it's like this tiny, it's a mini museum for a mini lighthouse. Awesome. But that's our cute, um, apparently maybe self-proclaimed smallest working light tower in the world. That's quick. Do we, do we, um, mini so short. So do you, do we know more about this gentleman? Can we learn more maybe as a future history boo? Or, uh, yeah, maybe see if he, uh, there wasn't a lot about him out there. He didn't, um, an article. Well, he did an interview with some Scotland magazine or something that talked a little bit about things that I talked about. So I'll be crediting that in my references so people can take a look.

15:49 Awesome. His clothing choices are highly fashionable. Yeah. It looks like a tropical shirt under a sweater, a sweater under a keeper's jacket. I would say. It looks like corduroy. Yeah. And then some bright blue pants. We're living for it. This is awesome. All right. But that's it. Yeah. That's, um, North Queens, fairy Harbor light. Well, thank you. You're welcome. I'll be covering another short episode next time. I'm almost done with it, another international one because I cannot help myself, but in my defense we've been doing tons of us lighthouses. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm going to give some international focus and then we'll double back.

16:35 Choked. Sorry. Vince is just, oh, we better wrap it up. After that short, then it'll be my turn. No, that's three in a row. Is it? Okay. Well, good. I can't talk anymore. Thank you all for joining. Catch you next time on the lighthouse. Just died on my coffee.