JUST 4.25 miles on the other side of the estuary, stands Spurn lighthouse - a sight more familiar to folk in Cleethorpes and Grimsby than it is to those in Yorkshire.
Although decommissioned in 1985, it has retained an impressive and reassuring presence - not just to mariners but to anyone taking a stroll along local beaches.
It has been standing since 1895.
One of those to whom it had a special significance was a Grimsby farmer and ornithologist John Cordeaux - a Victorian-era pioneer in the study of bird migration.
He realised that lighthouse keepers, including those, at Spurn, had unrivalled insights into the coastal movement of migrating birds such as skylarks, goldcrests, redwings and woodcocks.
Cordeaux became secretary of a committee that persuaded keepers at lighthouses throughout Britain to keep records of those birds they were able to see and identify.
One of the most astonishing discoveries was that, especially on foggy or drizzly nights, literally hundreds of thousands of birds were fatally attracted by the beams of lights and crashed into the lanterns, usually with fatal consequences.
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| Spurn - favourite destination for Grimsby ornithologist John Cordeaux |
In the case of bulkier birds, such as geese or eagles, they could cause immense structural damage by shattering the glass of the lanterns.
All this information is recounted in absorbing detail in a superb book - A Natural History of Lighthouses (Whittles Publishing).
Its author, John A. Love, is both an expert ornithologist (eagles are his speciality) and an authority on lighthouses.
He does not specifically refer to the one at Spurn, but much of what he writes is highly relevant.
It should also be said that he has a most entertaining and lively writing style.
Through exhaustive research of old newspapers and other sources, he has tracked down many extraordinary contemporary eye-witness accounts - not just about birds, butterflies and other creatures that evidently arrive even at the remotest rock lighthouses, but also about the strange and often dangerous lives of their human occupants.
What is more, the book contains more than 200 stunning colour photographs and other illustrations.
To his great credit, the author also quotes the powerful lines of Jean Ingelow, a now almost forgotten Lincolnshire poet of the Victorian era, who described thus the destruction of Cornwall's Eddystone lighthouse:
The great mad waves were rolling graves,
And each flung up its dead:
And when the dawn, the dull grey dawn
Broke on the trembling town
And men looked south to the harbour mouth
The lighthouse tower was down
The cover price of A Natural History of Lighthouses is £30, and the book can be ordered from booksellers or online outlets.
However, for those who order via the publishers' website - https://bit.ly/3q5higm - there is a 20 per cent discount by inserting the promotional code WPLINCS20
This offer will run until February 12, 2021.
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