I was walking along the seashore road at Roanheads in Peterhead the other day.  My eye had been drawn to the spray flying off the waves, with the oil supply ships beyond.  Then I heard the gull screaming from a chimney pot.  He posed rather nicely, even staying put, so that I could get him in silhouette.

 

Turning round I tried another shot of a tower with a little flagpole standing at the corner of the road leading up to the harbour, beside the breakwater.   But what was the tower?

Over a year ago I had heard about the planned improvements at the Peterhead Harbour, which included the relocation of an old lighthouse.  I marked it down as a possible photograph but had done nothing about it.

This was the old lighthouse (now in its new position) originally provided in the middle of the 19th century by Thomas Stevenson to mark the harbour entrance after a fishing boat disaster.   I did a bit of digging about on the internet and came across an old picture of the harbour which shows the lighthouse in its original place.  I have no idea what the picture shows, or when it was taken, but it looks like the early 1900s.  You can see the top of the lighthouse quite clearly at the top right of the picture

At that time, and up until the mid 1970s there was a north entrance to Peterhead harbour which is now closed off by a big new breakwater.   This entrance to the North Harbour was where Stevenson’s lighthouse stood proudly, shining its red and white light to guide the boats into harbour.

The current harbour development work meant that it had to go, but it is too important a structure to be lost, so it was moved stone by stone and re-erected in its present position at the end of Alexandra Parade.  You can read the proposal here.   It was officially opened in June 2016.

So that’s another, very different, lighthouse added to my collection.