What now remains of the ancient building tower, octagonal without but square within, which consists of four distinct stories; the two lower were entered from an annexe building, whilst the two upper were mere stages reached by ladders. The beam-holes may still be seen, and they show that this was the arrangement. Two entrances to the tower remain—low and narrow doorways, one exactly over the other; the upper being the narrower of the two. The basement is lit by a couple of square-headed windows, not very wide, with arched lintels in the inner face. Such is the ancient lighthouse of St. Catherine’s as we see it to-day; certainly a picturesque ruin, and certainly possessed of interesting and romantic associations. The spot was already a hermit’s cell in the year 1312, when the Bishop of Winchester admitted Walter de Langeberewe to ‘the hermitage on the hill of Chale, dedicated to St. Catherine the Virgin.’ Whether or not it was then part of the hermit’s duty to light and trim a lamp in his hermitage to warn vessels of the presence of St. Catherine’s Point, hard by, we do not learn; but we know, now, that this was no unusual task for the occupant of a hermitage. Two years after Walter’s admission, that is, in the winter of 1314, a ship—one of a fleet chartered by some merchants of Aquitaine to bring over a consignment of wine into England from the vineyard of a monastery in Picardy—went ashore near the hermitage, and soon the force of the waves dashed her to pieces, scattering her cargo, which was, most of it, washed ashore. Her crew escaped safely to land, and then gathered together as many of the casks as they could, which—thinking that the owners would imagine all had been lost with the ship—they proceeded to dispose of, for the best terms they were able to make, to the inhabitants round about.