Les Phares de Chansons et de Contes

A few years ago, I was wrong! I know, hard to believe, but I asserted in a book review that Le Tour de Cordouan featured as Gorodish's hideaway in the [super; cool] film Diva [wch prev]. Everbode kno that it is rather Le Phare de Gatteville [R wikicommons] in Normandie located just North of the D-Day beaches; but 380km = 5-6 hours by car from Paris. 

Three weeks ago, it was flagged on Metafilter that Bressay Lighthouse in Shetland is available for sale by Savilles.: a snip at £350,000 for 1 tower + 3 houses 7 beds 3 baths 3 sitting rooms. It is also about 5-6 hours [by plane and ferry] from Paris. Ah well, it's not going to happen for me in this lifetime. 

In the MeFi comments there was link to another lighthouse which fulfilled someone's dream. The light on Graves Shoal/Ledge is on the seaward edge of Boston Harbor about equidistant from Hull, Boston, Nahant and Winthrop. The shoals, which are about 40,000 tide-washed sq.m. [call it I acre] in extent had been ceded to the Federal Govt in 1903  by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for so long as the property was used as a “light and fog signal station.” It was bought from the Feds in 2013 by Boston resident David Waller for his own quixotic reasons. in 2019, the Town of Hull decided to asesss Graves Ledge for property tax. Mr Waller appealed and after much to-fro the Massachusetts Land Court decided Hull had no locus standi in the matter. This scrap of seaweed and seabird-shit covered 'land' is thus maybe the only unincorporated part of the Commonwealth. Check out the 50 pp PDF judgment if you like pedantic detail, mappes and historical research.

In 1990, we sold up in England and returned to Ireland "to give The Boy [then 14] a sense of cultural identity" and "to buy an old farm with 10 acres and outbuildings". I had secured a retraining fellowship and was pushing the frontiers of science in TCD. The cunning plan was to contact auctioneers down-country with our specs and go visit suitable properties at the weekends. The first place we got serious about was The North Light at Duncannon looking out over Waterford Harbour. That link is to a post by Pete "The Lights" Goulding on my pal Russ's TidesAndTales blog which gives an illustrated history of that piece of paradise. In 1990-1991 we found that, for £35K Irish, we had our pick of old farmhouses with 5-12 acres of scrubby fields with or without sheds. It was a buyers market at the end of then 80s recession and we were fussy.

The Duncannon light came with maybe half an acre [0.2 ha] of terraced 'gardens' at the end of a long bohereen. It was cosy. We rocked up to the auction with a ceiling of £35,000 and a counter cheque for 10% of that, then substantial, amount. For context we had sold our 4 bed 150sq.m. terraced house in Newcastle upon Tyne for £53,000. I got to throw my cap into the bidding twice but it blew through £35K and finally went from more than £100,000 to a couple of Dublin professionals as a second home. More details and pics at the NHBS National Heritage Buildings Service.

It took us five years and two more children to finally off-load our money on Irish property. But that wait bought us 16 acres as well as the farm and out-buildings. Despite reading and re-reading John Seymours' Self-sufficiency and Kains' Five Acres and Independence, we never worked out how we might make a living on and about the farrrm. And that aspect would have been even less likely at Duncannon Light.