After turning the south-west corner of England we find few existing lighthouses with anything like respectable antiquity; indeed, the voyager along our western shores of a century and a half ago was almost entirely without lights to guide him. At the monastic dissolution, however, matters were probably otherwise; one of the few lighthouses mentioned by Leland as surviving the commencement of the religious changes is at Pendinas, or Cape Cornwall, near St. Just: ‘There is,’ he says, ‘at this point a chapel of St. Nicholas and a pharos for light for shipps sailing by night in those quarters.’ Then we have seen that the monks maintained lights at Ilfracombe[8], and the number of ruined chapels and hermitages along both the southern and northern banks of the Severn, on the islands in its midst, and on the coast of South Wales, leaves us in little doubt that, when these buildings were tenanted, and discharging the functions for which they were intended, the mariners’ path was not unlit. Before, however, we come to talk of lighthouses to the north of the Bristol Channel, the story of that of Burnham, at the entrance of the port of Bridgewater, must be told. There was no lighthouse there till early in the present century, but the small craft—fishing boats and the like—could, after nightfall, shape their course so as to avoid some treacherous banks by means of a light placed nightly in a fisherman’s cottage on the sandhills close to the sea; it had been first put there, years before, by a fisherman’s wife to show her husband where to anchor his boat on return from fishing. But at the time of which we speak it no longer served that purpose, for the fisherman had ere that found a watery grave. The wife was then a tottering widow, crazed by the grief that her husband’s death had caused her, and one form of her insanity was that he would yet come back, and so, night by night, she trimmed the lamp and placed it in the window that he might find it burning when he brought his boat to shore. Then it pleased God to rest her troubled spirit, and the lamp was lit no more. No mariner’s chart marked the widow’s light, but the fishermen of Burnham had learnt to know it and to appreciate its benefit in making the port; so when it ceased to burn they set to work to see how a similar or a better light might be maintained there, and the parson of the place, more perhaps out of good-nature than from an eye to business, offered to build a small lighthouse if they and others using the port would contribute some trifling sum towards its support. They consented, the patent was obtained, and the parson duly built his lighthouse. Certainly he can never have regretted doing so, for the trade of Bridgewater increased, the tolls yielded him quite a respectable income, and when, after an existence of some thirty years, it was acquired by the Trinity House he got £13,500 for his rights.