Just off the coast and at the north end of Whitley Bay is St. Mary’s Island and lighthouse (technically not an island as it is linked to the mainland by a causeway crossable at low tide, see above). The lighthouse and lighthouse keeper’s cottage have been a tourist attraction since the early 1990s, the lighthouse having been decommissioned in 1984. Spanish City (s.p.b.s) and St Mary’s Island in the middle distance figure on most pre-War promotional paintings for Whitley Bay. The lighthouse and keeper’s cottage were built of stone and brick and the complex now includes a small museum.
To the south one light at the end of a harbour wall at Tynemouth still functions, another lighthouse nearby is now decommissioned and is itself a tourist attraction.
Unlike at John Smeaton’s Eddystone lighthouse on the south coast the keeper and family at Whitley Bay back in the day could easily cross to the mainland on foot at low tide. This would have been less so for the keeper at Smeaton’s Spurn lighthouse (178? – 1895) as, although on land, it was more distant from the nearest shop at Easington. Withernsea’s lighthouse keepers lived in the town while Flamborough’s lighthouse staff lived not so far from Flamborough village.
As with Spurn, the lighthouse at Whitley Bay was built on a site occupied and manned by religious persons centuries before where charity compelled them to maintain a brazier as best they could to warn shipping. In the 15th century one Richard Reedbarrow ‘bought’ the right to maintain the brazier on Spurn and ‘charged ship’s captains’, although the logistics of these transactions is not clear to me.
The mainland immediately opposite St. Mary’s ‘Island’ is a grass, shrubs and patches of wetland man-made nature reserve. Just inland of the natural shingle upper beach at Easington (Holderness coast) are two semi-brackish natural ponds, also a valuable wetland environment.
(next time back to past descriptions of Hull).