How to Plan a Lighthouse Road Trip
Choosing Your Coast
The first decision in planning a lighthouse road trip is the simplest and the most important: which stretch of coast to follow. Some coasts are richer in lighthouses than others, and density matters when you are travelling by road — a route that connects ten lighthouses within fifty miles offers a different experience from one where you drive two hundred miles between each. The density of lighthouses on any coast is usually a function of its navigational history: coasts with dense shipping traffic, complex hazards, or a history of serious wrecks were lit earlier and more thoroughly.
New England is perhaps the most lighthouse-rich region in North America for a road-based itinerary. Maine alone has sixty-five active lighthouses, many of them accessible from the road or reachable by short ferry crossings to offshore islands. The coast from Kittery, at the New Hampshire border, to the Canadian border at Calais can be driven in under six hours on the principal road, but a lighthouse itinerary that includes Portland Head, Pemaquid Point, Marshall Point, Bass Harbor Head, and West Quoddy Head — the easternmost point in the continental United States — will take several days.
The North Sea coast of the Netherlands, with its distinctive brick towers and former Zuider Zee islands, offers a compact itinerary that can be driven in a weekend. The lighthouse on Terschelling (Brandaris, built in 1594 and still active), the iron tower at IJmuiden, and the famous Paard van Marken lighthouse on a former island in what is now an inland lake can all be visited on a single overnight trip. The Dutch coast is flat enough that lighthouses visible from the road stand out against the sky from considerable distances.
Using the Map Before You Go
The planning phase of any lighthouse trip benefits from a good navigational map rather than a standard tourist map. The Open the map on this site shows every OpenStreetMap-recorded lighthouse with its geographic position, light character, and where recorded, its access status. Use the map to identify concentrations of lighthouses within your target area, then build a route around them by checking which are accessible by road, which require a short walk, and which are accessible only by water.
Pay attention to the clustering of lighthouses. Two lighthouses within a few miles of each other — as at Cape Hatteras and Ocracoke on the North Carolina Outer Banks, or at Pigeon Point and Point Montara on the California coast — suggest that the coast between them presents particular hazards that demanded separate lights, which usually means interesting terrain and different architectural styles. The pair at Bodie Island and Cape Hatteras also illustrates how the same engineering challenge — marking a dangerous sand shoal from the land side — was solved with very different tower designs built decades apart.
Access Types and What They Mean
Lighthouse access varies enormously. The clearest distinction is between lighthouses that are open to the public — where you can enter the tower, climb the stairs, and stand at the gallery — and those that are active navigation aids maintained by a coast guard or lighthouse authority where visitor access is restricted or prohibited.
Fully open lighthouses in the United States are often operated by heritage organisations under lease or licence from the National Park Service or the US Coast Guard. Portland Head Light in Maine is maintained by the Cape Elizabeth town parks department and open daily. Cape Hatteras is within the National Park Service's Cape Hatteras National Seashore and open for climbing during a defined season (typically late spring through early autumn, weather permitting). Pigeon Point in California is a California State Parks unit with a hostel on the grounds.
In the United Kingdom, Trinity House maintains a programme of lighthouse openings in which selected stations are open to visitors during the summer, usually in conjunction with Open Days events. These are not year-round facilities — the lighthouses remain operational navigation aids and their primary function governs access. Irish Lights operates a similar programme for its stations in Ireland.
Offshore lighthouses require boat access and are frequently closed to individual visitors because the landing conditions are too hazardous for unorganised visits. Fastnet Rock off southwest Ireland offers boat trips that circle the rock without landing. Some offshore towers — the former Minot's Ledge lighthouse off Cohasset, Massachusetts; the Stannard Rock lighthouse in Lake Superior — are accessible only with difficulty even to the coast guard helicopters that service them.
Timing and Season
Most lighthouse visits are best in the period from late spring to early autumn, when access roads and car parks are open, visitor facilities are staffed, and — critically — the weather allows reasonable visibility. There is no point in driving to a coastal headland in a December gale to see a lighthouse that is completely obscured by spray and low cloud.
That said, dramatic weather enhances some lighthouse visits in ways that calm summer afternoons cannot match. Standing at the base of the Eddystone lighthouse replica at Plymouth Hoe while a south-westerly drives rain across Plymouth Sound gives an impression of the conditions that made the original tower necessary. Visiting Dunnet Head in the far north of Scotland in September, when the equinoctial gales begin and the cliffs below the lighthouse are white with breaking seas, is a more vivid experience than the same visit in July.
For photography, the quality of light at the coast during the golden hour — the period shortly after sunrise and before sunset — is exceptional. Coastal headlands, open to wide skies, catch the low-angled light better than most other landscapes. Many lighthouse photographers target the hour after dawn specifically, when the light is warm, the air is typically clearer than in the afternoon, and the human activity that clutters a popular lighthouse in summer has not yet begun.
The Practicalities of Access Roads
Many lighthouse roads were built to allow lighthouse service vehicles to reach the station for maintenance, not to accommodate tourist traffic. They are often narrow, unsurfaced for part of their length, and subject to restrictions that are not obvious until you arrive at the gate. Checking current access conditions before setting out is essential; many lighthouse authorities post access information on their websites, and the dedicated lighthouse organisation for each country — Trinity House for England and Wales, the Commissioners of Northern Lighthouses for Scotland, Irish Lights, the US Coast Guard for American lighthouses — usually has current information.
Parking at popular lighthouse sites can be genuinely difficult in peak season. Portland Head Light in Maine, one of the most photographed lighthouses in the United States, has a car park that fills by mid-morning on summer weekends. Arriving at opening time, or choosing weekdays over weekends, makes a significant difference. Some of the less-visited lighthouses on the same coast — Owls Head, Marshall Point, Pemaquid Point — are equally photogenic and far less crowded.
Walking access to offshore or cliff-edge lighthouses varies in difficulty from the easy paved path to the Bishop Rock lookout on the Scilly Isles to the sustained coastal path section required to reach Souter Point in County Durham or Mull of Kintyre in Argyll. For the longer walks, standard coastal walking equipment — waterproof layers, appropriate footwear, and a charged phone — is sensible regardless of the forecast.
Building the Itinerary
A useful lighthouse itinerary balances geographic concentration with variety in architecture, period, and type. A route entirely composed of nineteenth-century conical granite towers becomes repetitive; mixing tower styles — a screwpile caisson light on a harbour entry, a classical stone column on a cape, a cast-iron skeleton tower in a swamp — provides the variety that makes the physical journey intellectually interesting as well as scenic.
The Cape Fear to Cape Lookout section of the North Carolina coast, for example, includes the brick tower at Bald Head (Old Baldy, built in 1817 and the oldest surviving lighthouse in North Carolina), the striking black-and-white diamond pattern tower at Cape Lookout (built 1859, 169 feet), and the isolated Ocracoke lighthouse (built 1823, still operating with its original 1823 tower, among the oldest in the US). The landscape changes dramatically between these three points — from suburban, to barrier island wilderness, to ferry-accessed island community — and the architectural difference between Bald Head's early brick construction and Cape Lookout's brick engineering reflects four decades of increasing sophistication in lighthouse design.
The practical measure of a good lighthouse road trip is simple: at the end of it, do you understand the coast you drove better than when you started? The lighthouses, taken together, tell the story of the hazards, the engineering, the history, and the maritime economy of the stretch of coast they mark. That makes the route more than a collection of photographic targets — it makes it a structured way of reading a landscape.