The lighthouse keeper who stayed on

Words by Maren Holt · 6 minute read

The light on Carrow Point was automated in 1998. Nobody told Edwin Rourke he had to leave, so he didn't. He was paid to keep the light for twenty-three years, and he has kept it for free for the last eighteen.

Every morning at six he walks the eighty-one steps to the lamp room and writes the weather in a ledger: wind, sea state, visibility, anything he saw. The coastguard stopped reading the ledgers decades ago. He keeps them anyway, stacked by year in a cupboard that no longer closes.

"Someone might want them," he told me. Last year, someone did. A team studying coastal erosion found that his ledgers are the only daily record of this stretch of sea for forty years, and the most accurate one they have.

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