Building Wolf Rock Lighthouse | The Secret Life of Lighthouses

The Rock Lighthouse. One of the most heroic feats of engineering in maritime history. They were their eyes. They were the front line of defense. Built to save the lives of thousands at sea. The sea is always a very real and present danger. They drown in epic storms. You have no chance of getting off. So how did they build them? Oh, that is majestic. And how do they stay standing? What a beauty. I bet that gets really hot. I'm going behind closed doors. Wow! To explore a hidden world of spine-chilling tales. The body of his colleague was starting to decompose. Sunken treasure. That's one of the muskets that we found down there on the wreck. No way! Look at that. And dazzling innovations. Literally playing with fire. To uncover the secrets. There is a pure magic about a light in the dark. Of some of the most extraordinary structures this country ever built. This time in a desert rock. Biggest ship killer of them all. If you hit that rock with a ship, that is basically the end of it. As impossible to build on. It was a hard rock to conquer. As it was to avoid. The entire coastline is strewn with shipwrecks. This is the story of the men who lived there. The one lighthouse that everybody dreaded going to. That was the lighthouse I got. To keep the light burning, whatever the cost. People swinging against the sides of the rock. Being dunked into the freezing Atlantic. Occasionally, just occasionally, you're dragged through the water. The Wolf Rock White. This is Penzance. An historic port in Cornwall and its most westerly major town. Here we are. Morning Rob, welcome aboard Vanessa Jane. How are we looking? Good. Hopefully no seasickness. Well, fingers crossed. I'm leaving dry land behind me. And heading out to the southernmost tip of Britain. The name Land's End says it all really. In the direction I'm traveling, there's precious little but water. Stretching from here, pretty much all the way to North America. And these waters have been plied by seafarers for thousands of years. And the rich Cornish maritime history has become synonymous with those who live and work on the edge. It's sheer granite cliffs and just underwater reefs. This is one of the deadliest coastlines in the entire country. The force of the North Atlantic is unleashed. The entire coastline is strewn with shipwrecks. I mean, just hundreds and hundreds. The whole coastline is black with them. One rock in particular has proved fatal for seafarers and their cargo for centuries. It juts from the seabed 60 meters below and is barely visible at high tide. Wolf Rock. The Wolf Rock always seems to be grasped by water. There's nothing really between it and America. And so it experiences these very violent, very dramatic Atlantic storms. You've got 3,000 miles of sea build it up and then you've got the wolf. If you hit that rock with a ship, that is basically the end of it. No one knows how the death's here. So a lighthouse was essential to warn ships away. Strong enough to withstand the battery from the Atlantic. And they built it right on top of me. Oh, that is majestic. You get all the waves crashing in here and occasionally you do get a bit of a peek of the rock itself. But not that often. You can see how well hidden it is. What a beauty. That iconic profile with smooth edges to deflect the water away as the waves come crashing in just like that. Magic. The dark coloration of the stone about halfway up gives you a good indication that those stones are always wet as the water keeps crashing in constantly. These waves, this swell and the winds as well are coming straight in off the Atlantic. They're unforgiving. And there's an enduring legend about the sound the wind made as it pushed through fissures in this rock. Many sailors within earshot had an unnerving description of these sounds. It's like a wolf howling. Hence the name Wolf Rock. Which is also very fitting considering that this is where England bares its teeth into the Atlantic. Wolf Rock Lighthouse reaches 41 meters and is one of the tallest in England. It's one of three that were built around here more than 150 years ago and it quickly became the most notorious. The one lighthouse that everybody dreaded going to was the Wolf Rock and that was the lighthouse I got. It was stuck out in the worst of the weather if it came in from the southwest. The seas were exceptional down there. It wasn't uncommon for seas to go over the top of the wharf. Hello satellite, wolf replying. Rough sea with heavy ground swell. And once you were on the wharf, you didn't know when you were going to get off. I once left home December the 27th and didn't get back till March the 26th. You can imagine how difficult it was when Atlantic swell coming across from America, you know, you have no chance of getting off. That consequent sense of incarceration was particularly marked at the Wolf. Over the years, the sort of bad reputation it had among keepers as a station that it was difficult to get away from, to escape from, has given it this atmosphere. But for the ships that rely on it, Wolf Rock is a lifeline. The Wolf is going to be your first sight of Britain. There's shipping coming past all the time. So it's either going to go north as it comes off the Atlantic, or it's going to go south heading up the English Channel. Shipping's coming all directions. The hazard and an important landmark. And it's astonishing that they were even able to build on it, given its exposed position so far from land. So how did those early engineers even dare to stake a claim to Wolf Rock, eight miles out into the North Atlantic? This is Wolf Rock. For hundreds of years, unsuspecting mariners had crashed into it. But engineers would struggle to mark it as a hazard. It was so rare for the seas to be calm enough to even get on the rock. In 1790, a Cornish mine engineer considered the feasibility of getting rid of the thing altogether by blowing it up. A year later, another man, Lieutenant Henry Smith, was granted a license to build a navigational mark. He was a lieutenant in the Royal Navy, and he cruised this area in 1781, 1782, and seems to have developed a passion for marking the hazards in this area. Smith's daring engineers leapt off the boat and managed to hack out enough of a hole in the rock to erect a 20-foot-high iron mast. But it was the marker's finishing touch that was the pièce de résistance of this assault on the rock. It was topped off with a wolf's head cast in bronze. And apparently that head was made hollow so that the fierce Atlantic winds would make it howl. But within weeks, this first attempt to claim Wolf Rock was unceremoniously dispatched by the sea. So somewhere down there, there's a bronze wolf's head. Subsequently, there were other attempts to mark the wolf, each one ending in failure. None of them were strong enough to withstand the winter gales that the area experiences every year. As a result, ships continued to founder on the rock, culminating in three catastrophic wrecks in quick succession. A country that proposed itself as a global maritime power could not really afford to have unmarked hazards like the Wolf Rock lying around in its seas. And Trinity House realized that there was no choice but to mark it. Trinity House is the authority that runs all the lighthouses in England and Wales. And in 1861, it commissioned engineers William Douglas and James Walker to take on Wolf Rock. The construction of Wolf Rock Lighthouse seemed to become an agonizingly long war of attrition with Mother Nature. So the vicious seas and difficult access here meant that the work timetable wasn't so much reckoned in days per year, more like minutes. Sometimes conditions were so bad that the workers only managed to rack up 83 hours of work in the year. It would take a grueling three years just to dig the foundations. A measure of how difficult the Wolf Rock was to build. Six years hacking away at that rock, slowly, effortfully raising each piece of stonework can be seen when you look at some of the other building sites. Despite all of the technological advances by the time the Wolf was being built, it was still a hard rock to conquer. The blocks were jigsawed or dovetailed in such a way that they connected horizontally as well as vertically. So they were all interlocked, all totally bound into each other. They had to make sure it would withstand the relentless hammering of the Atlantic. Nine years after its architects first set foot on the rock, the Wolf's light shone for the very first time on the 1st of January, 1870. With the lighthouse fully functioning, it soon became clear that there was another problem, getting the men on and off the rock. Here on the Firth of Forth, Andy and his crew were going to help me work out how they did it, using nothing more than a length of rope and a winch. Getting on to the lighthouse was often done using something called a bosun's chair, which sounds quite grand, quite comfortable, a bosun's chair. It actually just involves a piece of rope and some competent knot tying. I'm using a knot called a bowline on the bite. And if I pull this tight, I have a knot here now that will not slip, no matter how hard I pull on that. I've got two loops around me, one goes just under my bump, and the other goes around the waist. Andy, can I borrow your expertise on my knot tying here? Are you happy I've tied a correct bowline on the bite there? Certainly, it looks like a beautiful wee bowline there. Now for the real test. Andy, can we get a hoist up please? You can indeed. Taking my weight and my feet are off. Oh yeah, and I'm away. I'm pretty pleased with that. And you can see why it's called a bosun's chair. I can really sit back in this. That's the Queensferry Crossing over there. I've got a better view up here. Look where I am. It's not the most comfy of methods of transportation I've ever had, but it does the job. I mean, bosun's chair is maybe a bit misleading, but you know, I certainly feel very secure in it. Just with a clever bit of rope tying and a knot there. Unlike the lighthouse keepers on the wharf, I don't have the swirling Atlantic wharf. The Trinity Houseboat THV Stella used to take you out. The launch was dropped into the sea and then a crane was rigged on the landing by the keepers and you would get into kind of a bosun's chair type of thing and they would then haul you up and swing you around so you're put on the lighthouse. Very, very few of us have such an arduous journey to work. Frequently, there were near misses. Keepers swinging against the sides of the rock, being dunked into the freezing Atlantic. Occasionally, just occasionally, you're dragged through the water. But if you had a wet relief, as they called it, you could send a message into the superintendent, permission to open the rum bottle. So that was a good thing. This extraordinary footage is of a crew change on Wolf Rock more than 70 years ago. The little boat has only a short time for the most treacherous operation in their dangerous journey, landing the new keepers. To cross this giant moat, where the smallest slip means certain death, the Trinity Housemen bring a bowline into action. Two months on this forbidding looking rock. Their only link with land was a radio. Their home was a 200 foot high tower. Beyond that, there was nothing but the sea. Now it's the turn of two others to enjoy the luxuries of Wolf Rock. Despite the dedication of their keepers, Wolf Rock and the other lighthouses in the area couldn't completely stop ships from sinking. There's an estimated 6,000 ships lying at the bottom of the sea around the coastline here. Thanks to its formidable array of gnarled cliffs, secret coves and submerged rocks. Out here, I'm floating above a ship's graveyard. Wreck hunter Ben Dunstan has been diving these waters for the past 22 years. In the last year alone, he's found 12 new wrecks and there are plenty still to be discovered. Do you have a system when you head out looking for wrecks? Do you go to specific sites where you think one might be or is it kind of we'll just swim around and see what we find? We've got two approaches to finding shipwrecks. You either research your wreck, know where your wreck is and you dive that spot or our favourite one is to just look at the coast and think to yourself, where would a ship end up sinking? If you pick either of them, you usually find shipwreck remains. Submerged beneath these waters is the Boyne. She'd already made the epic journey from Indonesia with 900 tonnes of sugar when she spotted the lights on Bullfrog. The Boyne was almost home when the fog came in for the entire coastline. Her crew thought she'd cleared Lizard Point and was on her way to Falmouth but she hadn't gone far enough. On the 1st of March, 1873, the Boyne crashed into the cliffs of Mounts Bay killing all but four of her 19 crew. The exact fate of the Boyne has been a mystery for almost 150 years. Now Ben thinks he's found her and her treasure drove. What have we got here? So the most impressive find, which is this, which is actually the ship's chronometer. That would have been carried on board to tell longitude. Well, let's see. That's amazing. It's got numbers on here, so we've got... You can see there, 3870, which is also stamped on the outside here. The makers were only active for a few years and they were active when the Boyne was made. Can we see what else we've got here? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. One of the first items that we found on the site was that sticking out of the ground. Is that a telescope? Yeah, it is. It's a telescope. When I first saw it, I completely didn't realize what it was. It wasn't until I broke the end out. That's actually the end cap. And there's the... No way! Yeah, there's the end lens. Can I have a look? Can I hold it? Of course. Yeah, yeah. It's made of brass. It's quite strong. I was not expecting to see that glass still in there. You think of what that's been through and how far that's gone, it's still intact. Wow. One clue that made Ben think he'd found the Boyne was the chronometer. Another was these knives and forks. If you actually look on the handles, they've got T on them. Now, W Tindall was the owner of the shipping line. So that confirms, basically, this is definitely the wreck of the Boyne. Amazing. Absolutely amazing. Look at this. Look at how ornate this is. The decoration on that. It's beautiful, isn't it? Goodness me. So when you were discovering this on the seabed, have they been quite far dispersed from the wreckage of where you can see the hull or the hulk of the ship is? It's actually where the ship has broken down. All these pieces which have survived have survived by slotting into the narrow slots in the rock. So all the fabric of the ship has completely gone to bits and it's just these small items which have managed to slide down and be preserved. Now, there's something else you've been carrying around with you. I'll give you a clue as to what that is. Well, yeah, okay. Okay. These look like musket boards to me. Oh, here we go. I mean, wow. So yeah, that's one of the muskets that we found down there on the wreck. And that was actually lying right down in the bottom of the gully, right in the base like that. Kind of almost wedged in. Yeah, wedged in. Unfortunately, the front piece here is gone. And if you look, it's only actually the timber and the brass pieces which are remaining, the iron barrel and the side lock mechanism, which would have been here. Yes. That's completely eroded away. But you have to remember, it's been down there for 150 years or something. Yeah, yeah. It's remarkable really that the wood has survived as good as it has. I'm astonished it has. Yeah. It's superb, Ben. I guess it's finds like this that makes you want to keep going back in to see what else is out there. It's just incredible that things like this have survived. When you've got things like this in your hand... It brings it to life, doesn't it? Yeah. Although the coastline is littered with wrecks and their buried treasure, Wolf Rock Lighthouse undeniably saved lives. But what was it like for the keepers who had to live on such an isolated rock? The Wolf Rock, miles off land's end and possibly the most challenging lighthouse ever for the men who had to work on it. The Wolf was probably the most notorious of all UK lighthouses. In fact, I can remember one occasion when somebody actually left the job as we were approaching. I said, no, I'm not going on there. It was a way of life and there were downsides when the weather was absolutely awful and time when you were cooped up, you know, with two others in a chimney basically for 28 days, which was damp and dark. If you didn't get on with the others and the crew, then life would be terrible. You just want to be somewhere else. There was nothing much you could do about it. Lighthouse keepers, they had one main task, which was to keep the light burning in good condition, in radiant brilliance at all times. So they had to be really technically competent, but they also had to keep the house, the building in good order, maintained, regularly swept and polished, ventilated. The tower rocks were the lights that paid the most and also were the ones that nobody wanted to go to. Facilities were fairly primitive on the Wolf. You didn't have a shower, you just got washed at the sink. You had a bucket for the toilet, they opened the lantern and you just threw it over the gallery rail. Lighthouse keeping was like a 19th century job in a 20th, 21st century world. We all knew that automation would eventually take over. When you look back to what we did do, what we put up with, people wouldn't put up with it these days, you know. It was a different era, it was a different way of life and it's gone now. But just because lighthouses were automated, it doesn't mean the keepers have gone for good. They just live on the lighthouse for a much shorter time. I've come to Land's End Airport to meet Ian Gorvin, a technical manager for Trinity House. His job title might have changed, but the task of keeping the light going hasn't. So where are we heading? This is our goods in storage area. All right. It's basically the lighthouse equivalent of Amazon. Ian's crew spend up to two weeks at a time in each lighthouse in the region and this is where they store everything they'll need for the jobs at hand. We've got a tabletop oven, that would do most of our cooking on a station. Where's that heading to? That's for longships. Right, okay. And we've got battery chargers in Lizard, some bulbs. There you are, Wolf Rock, there we go. Okay, there's not much in Wolf at the moment. We've got a tin of paint. That's it at the moment? Yeah. Just a tin of paint in Wolf Rock, but some of these boxes are a bit more... Yeah, things like tea towels. Is that toilet roll at the back there? Yeah, you can't have enough toilet roll on a station. Of course, I mean, we're not animals. Yeah, we have a nice door hinge. Wow, okay. So now we're getting a bit more industrial here. That's a good chunky hinge that, isn't it? Yeah. So I'm noticing there's quite a lot of big stuff on the shelves up here. They're water bags. They take 400 litres each, and that's how we refill each lighthouse with water. So we've got big storage tanks on the lighthouses. For cooking, washing, drinking whilst you've got crews out there? Yeah, it all comes in these bags. And all this is being delivered by helicopter? Yes. Today, the only way in and out of Wolf Rock is to land a helicopter on top of the lighthouse. And the landing pad is even smaller than the chopper itself. When you flew out there, you'd see the lighthouse getting bigger and bigger, and then it would just disappear when you were about to land and disappear underneath you. It just seemed so small. So how did they think a helipad could withstand the weight of a helicopter without destabilising the lighthouse or obscuring the light? The design and the concept of the helipads themselves was in of itself an ingenious piece of engineering, which can be seen as a kind of nice successor to the ingenuity of the Victorian designers and builders who raised these towers in the first place. The final design was based around a series of cross-linked steel frames. Four poles with front discs ensure the pilot can judge where he's landing as he can't see the helipad from the cockpit. Do you get times when you get out and it's just impossible to land and you think, well, no, we can't? Yeah, the waves do overtop sometimes. When the waves are crashing over the helipad and the buffeting helicopter, you'd be terrified. If you're in that situation, it's either wait for a lull in the waves so you can land with enough time to get down below, or you have to back off and come back. I'll never forget my own journey to a rock lighthouse. I remember the helicopter approaching the tower and seeing the helipad there from that elevated position. And thinking it just looks like a postage stamp, a grey postage stamp surrounded by surging waves. And it was at that point the pilot decided to turn to us and say, you know, this is the first time I've actually flown to this one. How do I land? With the crews only on the lighthouse for around four weeks a year, how do they know when something goes wrong? There's a live link to each lighthouse operated from a central control facility at Harwich. And they use decommissioned equipment like this to train the technicians. So this is the computer side as such. We can control and receive all the feedback from each lighthouse and it will look at any alarms that are created on station. I mean, this is an absolute game changer, isn't it? Being able to remotely observe and analyse what's going on. I think the ultimate question for me to ask you, Ian, a modern day lighthouse keeper, is what happens when a bulb goes out? Well, we always have a backup. So if the main bulb goes, we'll go on to a main two bulb. So we have an automatic lamp changer. And is that a typical mechanism on top? Can we see what that would look like? Yes, certainly. So I'll just change over to... Oh, there we go. Easy as that. Yeah. If that were to happen, would you get notification of that remotely through a system like this? It would flag up a main one fail and then on to main two. None of us want to see a black station. You know, that's our worst nightmare. What you see coming through this shed here is there's so many other jobs and elements of lighthouses to keep working. You've got to be almost a jack of all trades. If you're on a lighthouse and your cooker fails, what are you going to do? You've got to be able to fix it. Or if the engine fails, that same person might have to fix the engine. And for a relatively small shed, there's quite a lot to take out from here. Technician Lewis Pullen has just come back from two weeks maintenance on Wolf Rock. If anything, a lighthouse keeper's job is more skilled than ever and almost as dangerous. And it includes everything from cleaning the optic to releasing trapped seagulls and changing the heli nets. That means taking nets out, putting a harness on, attaching onto the top of the lighthouse and then sitting over the side of the lighthouse and undoing these heli nets that are there one at a time. It's not an easy job at the best of times, but it's terrifying when you're so exposed. Really take our time to do it because obviously it's a super dangerous job. A bit scary when you look down and there's nothing below you apart from a reef and waves and things like that. Rock Towers, there's a network of shore-based lighthouses like this one, not far from base, Pendine, where I'm catching up with Ian again and he's going to put me to work. Yes, this is what we want to see. Oh, Ian, that's beautiful. OK, so we're up here. This is the business end of everything we've been talking about. What maintenance can we do here today? Well, we could have a look at getting you cleaning the optic. I'd love to. Where do we start? Well, start with turning the optic off. There we go. There's a lot of glass in there. Yeah. So what's the wiki's secret trick to cleaning this two and a half tonne optic? I've never been in this position before. Household glass spray and elbow grease. I'm literally inside the lens now. All right. And how often is a job like this being done? Here we do it quarterly. In the old days, the keepers were probably in here every day cleaning. It's like being inside a kaleidoscope. It is, yes. This lens may be almost 100 years old, but it's the reason why the light is visible 16 nautical miles away. One of the biggest dangers I'm finding up here is when you just move about a little bit, it really makes you very dizzy the way the light just bounces off all of this. Got to be quite careful. It's really quite trippy. But it's now dark enough outside that the lights come on inside. And I don't want to get in the way. All right. Well, I'm going to have to call that a day then. So back down. Just as we're leaving, I spot something I can't ignore and have a bit of a moment. Oh, look at that. I bet that gets really hot. We've gone to this size now from that. So the kind of halogens you've got up there now, they're roughly what? 35 watts. This is 3,500 watts. Wow. 100 times more powerful a bulb, but not necessarily the amount of light that you get, but the electricity that it takes. That is amazing. That's like the size of my head. There are more than 60 lighthouses in the UK warning ships of potential hazards. But with all our technical advances, why does our coastline still sink ships? Oh, God, that's so good. All happening out here. Here's dolphins. Hello, mate. Magical. For me, there are few places more beautiful and awe-inspiring than Cornwall, or more deadly. And reefs like these are as threatening to ships as they've always been. This is the wreckage of RMS Mülheim. It was heading for a landfill site in Lübeck on the north coast of Germany. It was coming around land's end. The chief petty officer stood up, caught his trouser leg in the footplate control lever, fell over, blacked out, and the ship ran straight onto the rocks. Though our ability to overcome nature is extraordinary, bad luck and human error can get you in the end. Ships will always get wrecked. There will always be accidents. There will always be incompetence. It's all very well having all these navigational instruments, but you've still got to keep a good physical lookout. And that is just the same today. Systems go down. There have been incidents where a ship has come to grief simply because there wasn't a good physical lookout. Here at the University of Plymouth, they have an amazing bit of kit that helps to prevent accidents before they happen. A state-of-the-art ship simulator. Oh, hang on. It's very realistic, isn't it? This is very clever. I've come here to learn how to safely navigate a 93,000 ton container ship home from the Atlantic. Is it a typical bridge? This is a typical layout. The modern ships now have what we call an electronic display and information system. Okay. That's real-time information that's telling us where the vessel is on that chart. The ship also has radars, another navigation aid to show us what's around us and often what course we're on. And so fixed objects that the radar would pick up would include what? It would include land. An example here, we have the Wolf Rock, two and a half miles away. I can see it. And we have land. So we have land's end there. So our electronic charts and our radar. And what they often call the Mark 1 eyeball. The original and best for. The original and the best. That's using just your eyes to spot something. And we can see the Wolf Rock, so we could take a visual bearing of that aid to navigation. Very good. Where are we set to be heading? Well, we're heading north. So land's end will gradually come past us. Yes, you can see the vague outline of it there. Steering at the moment is being done by autopilot. OK. So if I were to put a command into the wheel here to steer towards land end. Would you like to do that? I would love to do that, yeah. OK, so you now have the wheel. Wow. I am loving this. It's the closest I'll ever get to steering a ship. So I'm seeing lots of numbers change. That's the rudder that you've applied. So I've applied quite a bit. You've applied quite a lot of rudder. We're not going to lose any of these containers off the side, are we? No. No, very good. We're definitely going around. Goodness me. And we can see it on here. And the radar as well. It's quite an aggressive turn. I tell you what, I mean, I'm feeling that in my legs. And we're sailing dangerously close to land. What we'll get you to do is to get the vessel back on course. Shall we put the wheeler midships down? Yeah, let's do that. So my tilt is coming back off. My ROT, is that what it is? Yes. OK. And we want it to go on three, six, zero, zero, zero. OK. In north, OK? If all this went down for some reason, is there a backup? We have our radar. Vessels are also required to keep a certain number of paper charts as backup. So I'm trying the exercise again, this time without the help of electronic charts. So we've got Wolf Rock Lighthouse off here. The land's end is ahead of me. So to be north, we need to be heading a lot more in this direction here. Yeah. So I'm going to bring that around. What really helps me is being able to look out and see visual markers, like the lighthouse, like the land. Lighthouses aren't just a warning. They're also part of the landscape and a vital aid to navigation. So we are starting to come around. Here we go. OK, well. God only knows how stressful this would be if I had winds coming across and that visibility that I was taking those aids from was gone through fog or through heavy rain. It's not easy. And you can see how you could quickly get yourself into danger if you didn't know what you were doing. So we're going to resume our course of due north, zero, zero, zero. Yes. Any help you can get out here could possibly save lives. One of the reasons Wolf Rock is such a hazard to shipping is that it doesn't really seem to belong there. It's surrounded by open water. It sticks straight up from the seabed and it's isolated. It's all on its own. So what's it doing there and where did it come from? To understand why rocks like these catch seafarers unawares, we need to go back hundreds of millions of years to how they were formed in the first place. The greatest influence on the landscape and the geology of Cornwall are two major tectonic events that happened around about 300 million years ago. The first was the collision of two continents colliding together where huge plumes of molten magma would rise up and intrude into the Earth's crust. Under immense heat and pressure, these plumes would slowly change the surrounding sedimentary rock. And it takes almost two million years to cool down to form the rock that will eventually become granite. Geologist Robin Shale is an expert on the different rock formations found in this area. We're sat on top of granite. Granite is present below the whole peninsula from West Devon through Cornwall. Huge volumes of it, maybe 45,000 cubic kilometres of this molten material have been injected close to the Earth's surface. And when it's eroded, it produces these spectacular landforms that you can see around me. So looking out Robin, about eight miles out there, I can see Wolf Rock. So is that a continuation of the rocks we're on here now? No, it's actually completely different. It's a bit of a geological oddity. We form the granites by plate collision but actually we form Wolf Rock by pulling plates apart. Wolf Rock is a remnant of volcanic activity. Magma would have welled up and pushed its way through a fissure in the Earth's crust inside this volcano. But suddenly it began to cool down and it solidified in the vent forming what we know now as Wolf Rock. Wolf Rock started out as something much bigger than we see today. It would have looked something a bit like this, a very typical cone-like volcanic shape. And over a long period, millions of years, that volcano became dormant. It was no longer erupting. I'm going to show what impact that had. So for my little demonstration, I need some Ice Age seawater. Luckily, I prepared earlier. All right, so let's see what happens. All right, here we go. It all starts to erode away. This is the evolution of the Earth sped up. Corrosion, corrosion, Ice Ages come and go. Oh, what have we here? There we go. So I'll finish off our years of erosion here by hand. And what we're left is this lump of hard rock that was hidden away in the core of what was my volcanic cone all around it. This is Wolf Rock. The Wolf was and is still a really important kind of staging post. There must have been a lot of shipwrecks on it before the light was built. The sea is rarely ever be calmed at the tower's foot. It's always on the move. It's always rough. The lighthouse was designed and built to sort of dissipate the energy of the sea. So though it might shake, you know, no water would go up past the windows and that. It wasn't going to be the end of the world. As long as you are inside the lighthouse, you're OK, you're safe. The Wolf Rock Lighthouse has been given one of the toughest jobs of any man-made construction to stand up to the awe-inspiring and ever-present power of the North Atlantic. And it's been doing just that for 150 years. And you know what? It doesn't show any signs of giving up just yet. Thanks to a combination of brilliant engineering, 21st century technology and dogged determination, the Wolf Rock Lighthouse seems set to always be here. A beacon reaching out to distant horizons.