Witness account · 3 min read · Set in Skerry Head ·
The Watch That Kept the Tide at Skerry Head
A lighthouse keeper's wife at Skerry Head keeps the tide tables for the station, and in one March she writes down a high water that the sea never reaches, and the rocks below the light are dry at the hour she recorded.
- reliability: corroborated
- witness: Mary Leask, lighthouse keeper's wife
I have kept the tide tables for the Skerry Head light since my husband took up the post in 1981, and I have never once made a mistake in them. It is a plain job. You take the readings from the gauge on the landing each hour, you write them into the book in pencil, and at the end of the month you send the sheet to the harbour board in Ostrova, where it is copied into the national returns. My hand is steady and my arithmetic is good. I was a bookkeeper before the children came.
On the night of the fourteenth of March I was on the early watch with the lamp, and at a quarter to four I went down to the landing to read the gauge, as I always do. The sea was flat and grey in the moonlight. The wind had dropped right off. The tide, by the printed table, should have been on the ebb, running steadily out over the reef below the light.
It was not. The water stood at the high-water mark on the gauge, perfectly still, as if it had been poured into a cup and left to settle. Then it began to rise.
I have seen a high spring tide a dozen times. I have never seen the sea rise without a ripple. This rose in one smooth motion, like a sheet being drawn slowly up over a bed, until the water covered the lowest step of the landing and lapped at the iron rail. I stood with the pencil in my hand and the book open, and I recorded the reading. Then I looked down at the reef.
The reef was dry. I could see the black weed on the stones and the white line of the surf breaking far out beyond them, and the stones between were bare in the moonlight. The sea had come up to the landing and stopped, and the reef below the light stood clear and empty, and I had been writing down a high water that the rocks did not show.
I wrote it in the book anyway. I did not know what else to do. I wrote the time, the height, the word *high* in my own hand, and I signed it.
The next morning my husband, Robert, read the entry and asked me whether I had been sleeping. I said I had not. He took the book down to the landing himself, and checked the gauge, and came back with a strange look on his face. The gauge read exactly what I had written. He said it had been a very high tide, the highest he had seen on the station. He said the rocks below the light had been under water for nearly an hour.
I had seen them dry. I told him so. He said he believed me.
We have had many more high waters since then. Each one appears in the book in my handwriting, to the minute, to the centimetre, always precisely as the printed table predicts, and always precisely as the sea is not. I stand on the landing at the appointed hour and watch the water rise up the steps, and each time I look down at the reef and see it bare and shining in the moonlight. Each time the book records it wet.
The harbour board in Ostrova have written twice to query the Skerry returns. They say the figures are very neat. They say they cannot find a single error in them.
I keep the tables still. I have never once given a false reading, and I do not intend to begin now. But when the wind is right, and the moon is low over the water, I sometimes stand on the landing a little longer than I need to, and listen, and I can hear the sea below me saying the time, very softly, in my own voice, and I write it down.