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# The last keeper of Hornby Point
- URL: https://noir.ghostcms.templates.codememory.com/the-last-keeper-of-hornby-point/
- Published: 2026-09-23T06:30:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-23T06:30:00.000Z
- Description: The light was automated in 1994. Callum Reid stayed another twenty-six years anyway. A week with him before he left.
- Author: Elena Varga
- Tags: Portraits, Landscapes, #Import 2026-09-30 04:46

The lighthouse at Hornby Point was automated in 1994\. The last keeper, a man named Callum Reid, stayed on for another twenty-six years anyway. Nobody paid him. Nobody asked him to. He simply did not see a reason to leave.

When I met him, he was eighty-one and had just agreed, reluctantly, to move to a flat in the nearest town, forty minutes away by a road that floods twice a winter. He let me spend his last week at the light with him.

![Hornby Point light in a February storm. The lamp has run automatically for thirty years.](https://noir.ghostcms.templates.codememory.com/content/images/2026/09/light-tower-2.jpg)

Hornby Point light in a February storm. The lamp has run automatically for thirty years.

## A life measured in rotations

The light turns once every twelve seconds. Callum has lived with that rhythm for fifty-three years, first as an assistant keeper, then as principal keeper, then as a man with no official role who still climbs the 131 steps every evening to check that the lens is clean.

"You stop hearing the machinery after the first year," he told me on the first night, as we sat in the kitchen at the base of the tower. "But you never stop seeing the light. It goes round the room every twelve seconds, all night. I have not slept in proper darkness since 1971."

![The 131 steps. Callum still climbs them every evening.](https://noir.ghostcms.templates.codememory.com/content/images/2026/09/light-stairs-2.jpg)

The 131 steps. Callum still climbs them every evening.

## The work that used to be

Before automation, keeping a light was relentless. The lamp had to be lit at sunset and extinguished at sunrise. The lens, a vast beehive of glass prisms, had to be polished every day. The clockwork that turned it had to be wound every few hours through the night. In fog, the keepers sounded the horn by hand.

Three keepers shared the work, living in the cottages at the foot of the tower with their families. There was a school boat on Mondays and a supply boat on Thursdays, weather permitting. Often it did not permit.

> People think it was lonely. It was never lonely. It was the busiest job I ever had.  
>  
> **Callum Reid**

![](https://noir.ghostcms.templates.codememory.com/content/images/2026/09/light-lamp-2.jpg)

![](https://noir.ghostcms.templates.codememory.com/content/images/2026/09/light-coast-2.jpg)

The great lens and the coast below the station.

## Photographing the light

The lighthouse is a difficult subject. By day, it is a white tower against a grey sky, beautiful but flat. By night, the beam is invisible except where it catches rain or spray. The best photographs came in the hour after sunset, when there was still colour in the sky and the lamp was bright enough to register.

I used long exposures, some of them several minutes, with the camera wedged against rocks to stop the wind shaking it. The beam appears in these photographs as a series of pale spokes, each one a single rotation captured over time.

🌊

Long exposures near the sea: use a heavy tripod or brace the camera against rock, and wipe the lens every few minutes. Salt spray ruins more photographs than wind.

## Leaving

On the last morning, Callum walked round the tower once, slowly, touching the stone. He did not climb the steps. He said he had already said goodbye to the lamp the night before.

His daughter came with the car at ten. He put two suitcases and a box of logbooks in the boot, looked at the tower for a long moment and then got into the passenger seat without saying anything.

![The light on the last night, a four-minute exposure.](https://noir.ghostcms.templates.codememory.com/content/images/2026/09/light-night-2.jpg)

The light on the last night, a four-minute exposure.

## A day in the tower

Callum's routine barely changed in fifty years. He woke at six, made tea on the old range and walked the perimeter of the station, checking the fences, the gutters and the fog signal housing. At ten he climbed to the lamp room to clean the lens, a job the engineers told him years ago was no longer necessary. He did it anyway, every day, with a chamois leather and a bottle of methylated spirit.

Afternoons were for the logbooks. Every keeper since 1868 has recorded the weather, the ships sighted and anything unusual. Callum kept writing entries long after anybody required him to. His last entry, written on the evening before he left, reads: "Wind SW 5, sea moderate, visibility good. Light burning normally. Keeper departs tomorrow."

![The coast below the station, where the supply boat used to land.](https://noir.ghostcms.templates.codememory.com/content/images/2026/09/light-coast-2.jpg)

The coast below the station, where the supply boat used to land.

## Photographing a man who does not like being photographed

Callum did not want his portrait taken. For the first three days I photographed only the tower, the rooms and the sea. On the fourth day he asked to see the pictures, looked at them for a long time and said I could photograph him while he worked, as long as I did not ask him to smile. Every portrait in this story was taken after that conversation.

## The light goes on

The light will keep turning, checked twice a year by engineers who arrive by helicopter. It no longer needs a keeper. But on the drive back to town, Callum said something that stayed with me: "A machine can keep a light. It cannot keep a lighthouse. Those are different things."

I think he is right. And I think the difference is exactly what you can see in his face.