There is, as the reader will see on looking at the map, hardly a more useful lighthouse for the Irish navigation than the Skerries; but it did not do all that was needed to make safe nocturnal passages in St. George’s Channel. The Isle of Man, girt round as it is with innumerable rocks and islets, must have formed a serious obstacle to safety in crossing to Ireland before any lighthouse was placed there; and it is not strange to find a warning light on the Gulf of Man, forming part of the scheme of 1658 already mentioned; though it is remarkable that Hascard only suggested its being illuminated during ‘the six fairest months of the year.’ Probably the meaning of this is that during the winter season communication between England and Ireland was then regarded as practically impossible—no vessel would attempt it. Hascard’s scheme was supported by the mariners of Chester, Liverpool, and other ports in the north and west, but opposed, as we have said, by the Trinity House on the old grounds that its maintenance would add to the already too heavy burdens put upon the shipowners, though it must be said that, in 1664, the ‘brethren’ were induced to admit its utility, if a proper check was put on the amount of the contribution demanded! However, nothing came of the suggestion for a lighthouse on ‘the Calf,’ and none was put there till the last century; in fact, the only assistance that sailors of the eighteenth century received in their passage to Ireland by night was the benefit of two or three lighthouses at the entrance of the port of Dublin. We have now gone nearly round the coast of England in the survey of our lighthouses, and the part that we have yet to travel—that north of the Skerries—possesses exceedingly few about which there is much to say. Indeed, the almost entire absence of any lighthouses on the west coast, set up during the late sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, is a noteworthy feature in the history of the subject with which we have been dealing. It certainly points very strongly to the smallness of the west coast trade in those days. What lights the religious houses of Wales, and of Cheshire, Lancashire, Cumberland, and Westmoreland, may have supported, out of charity, we do not know; but, whatever they were, or wherever they were situated, no early attempt was made to re-erect them after the religious changes had snuffed them out. Late in the seventeenth century, as the trade of Chester and Liverpool rapidly increased, some attempts seem to have been made to place lights at certain points along the shores of the Dee and the Mersey; but the majority of lighthouses that we now see north of the Skerries have barely a century of history of which to boast: the most northerly in England, on the west coast, St. Bees, was established in 1714 as an open coal fire, and this form of light was continued there till within a hundred years ago. * * * * *