The World's Farthest Lighthouse from the Coast (9 photos)

Of all the world's lighthouses, none was built so far from the water it illuminated as the lighthouse atop Bidston Hill on the Irish Sea coast in England.





This heather- and wooded hill is one of the highest points on the Wirral Peninsula. It can be seen for miles, especially from the sea.



Bidston Hill

The first pair of lighthouses appeared here in 1763 to guide ships through the shallow sandbanks at the mouths of the Rivers Dee and Mersey approaching the port of Liverpool. When one of them collapsed a few years later, it was replaced by a new lighthouse further inland, on Bidston Hill, almost four kilometers from the sea.





Drawings of the Bidston Lighthouse and Reflector by Joseph Kachin, 1785

The upper lighthouse at Lisow then became the lower lighthouse. These two lighthouses are also 3.7 kilometers apart, making them the most distant pair of lighthouses in the world.



Because the Bidston Lighthouse was located almost four kilometers from the sea, Liverpool Harbormaster William Hutchinson developed a new lighting system for it – a parabolic reflector. This was the first time such a reflector was used in a lighthouse to concentrate the beam of light.



Lighthouse at Leasow

The reflector's diameter was approximately four meters. It was probably the largest such structure ever built for a lighthouse. The reflector was a concave wooden base covered with small mirror plates.



Bidston Lighthouse

However, this system had its drawbacks. The oil lamp consumed a huge amount of oil and produced a lot of soot, which often fogged the mirrors.



It was eventually discovered that several smaller reflectors, with parallel beams, produced the same brightness but consumed less oil. This mechanism served reliably for over a century until the reflectors were replaced with Fresnel lenses in 1873.



The lighthouses remained in operation until changes in Liverpool Bay made them obsolete in the early 20th century. The channel used by ships to enter and leave the Port of Liverpool silted up so heavily that it became unnavigable. Ships were forced to chart a new route, for which the guiding lights proved useless. The Bidston Lighthouse went out in 1913.