Cape Cod Lighthouses

Four separate relocations tell most of this story.

The Three Sisters, 1911 onwards. Eastham's cliff originally carried three small brick towers so that mariners could distinguish this stretch from Highland's single light and Chatham's two. Erosion took the brick ones, wooden replacements followed, and by the early twentieth century they had been sold off and scattered, one of them ending up as part of a private cottage. The National Park Service reassembled them in the 1980s in a clearing off Cable Road, about a thousand feet from the sea, where three lighthouses now stand in a wood looking at nothing. It is the oddest sight on the Outer Cape.

Chatham to Eastham, 1923. When Chatham's twin towers were reduced to one, the spare 1877 cast-iron tower was dismantled and carried roughly twelve miles north to Eastham to take over from the Three Sisters. That tower is Nauset Light.

Highland Light, July 1996. The 1857 brick tower stood a hundred feet or so from a cliff that was retreating steadily. Over eighteen days a specialist crew jacked it onto rails and moved it 450 feet west, intact and without dismantling the lantern. The operation was watched by a crowd and is documented on boards at the site.

Nauset Light, November 1996. Four months later the red and white tower, by then very close to the edge of a seventy-foot bluff, was moved 336 feet inland. It was relit on 10 May 1997, and the keeper's house followed in October 1998.

None of this is finished. The cliff is still moving and the towers are still sitting on it.

If you visit one, visit this one. Highland Light, still called Cape Cod Light by people who have lived here a while, sits on the highest clifftop on the Outer Cape and has been marking this shore since 1797. The present tower is the 1857 replacement: sixty-six feet of brick with its light some hundred and seventy feet above the water, which is why it carries further than its modest height suggests.

The setting is unusual. The tower stands in open moorland on the edge of the bluff with a golf course beside it, played since the 1890s and among the oldest in the country, and a clubhouse where you can get a sandwich. Thoreau walked this shore and stayed near here in the 1850s, and the description of the Highland keeper in his Cape Cod essays is still recognisable on the ground.

The 1996 move is the reason most people come. Standing where the tower used to be and looking at where it is now, a short walk inland, gives you the scale of the erosion problem in a way no interpretive panel manages. Markers on the ground show the old position.

The site is owned by the National Park Service, the light itself is still an active aid to navigation operated by the Coast Guard, and visitor services have been run by Eastern National since 2014. The tower opens for guided climbs in the warmer months, roughly May to late October, and the grounds and the cliff walk are accessible year-round and free. Come in the morning if you want the ocean lit; come in a gale in November if you want to understand the place.

Nauset Light is the one you have seen without knowing it. Forty-eight feet of cast iron lined with brick, painted white below and red above since the 1940s, it is the mark on every bag of Cape Cod Potato Chips and it sits on the Massachusetts "Cape Cod & Islands" registration plate. It began life in 1877 as one of Chatham's twin towers and was brought north in 1923.

It is also the best-placed tower on the Cape for a photograph. The light stands above Nauset Light Beach with a short walk between the two, and the classic frame is taken from the beach car park at the end of the day with the tower catching the last sun while the ocean behind it has already gone grey. The preservation society runs tours on limited days through the warmer months, and there is no charge to stand at the fence.

Five minutes away, off Cable Road, are the Three Sisters: three small wooden lighthouses standing in a grassy clearing surrounded by scrub oak and pine, a thousand feet from any sea. They were Eastham's original triple light, built to be distinguishable from Highland's one and Chatham's two, chased off the cliff in stages, sold, scattered and eventually reassembled here by the National Park Service. There is no admission and usually nobody else there. Ranger talks run in season.

Pair them. Twenty minutes for both, then walk down the stairs to the beach, and you have the whole argument of this coast in one stop: a light that was moved, three lights that ran away, and the ocean that made them do it.

Chatham Light sits at the elbow of the Cape, where the shore turns from south-facing to east-facing and the shoals run offshore in shifting bars that have wrecked ships for four hundred years. The station dates from 1808, when it carried two wooden towers so that mariners could tell it from Highland's single light. Brick replacements came in 1841, the present 1877 cast-iron towers followed, and in 1923 one of them went north to Eastham. What remains is a forty-eight-foot tower with a beam visible for something like twenty-four nautical miles, automated since 1982, with an aerobeacon fitted in 1993.

The keeper's house is an active Coast Guard station, which is why the light itself opens only on occasional set days. It is also why the parking area opposite is such a good place to stand: it is a working overlook, with a view down onto Chatham's barrier beaches and the water moving between them.

That view is the reason to come. In January 1987 the Atlantic broke clean through North Beach directly in front of the lighthouse, turning a sheltered harbour into an exposed one overnight, moving the navigable channel and eventually taking houses with it. The barrier has broken again since. The overlook is the single best place on Cape Cod to see a coastline actively rearranging itself, and the interpretation boards explain what you are looking at.

There is one more Chatham story worth knowing. In February 1952 a Coast Guard crew took a thirty-six-foot lifeboat out of this station into a winter gale and brought back thirty-two men off a broken tanker. The boat survives and is preserved along this coast, and the 2016 film The Finest Hours dramatised the rescue.

The tip of the hook carries three lights, and none of them is a drive-up.

Race Point Light stands out on the sand at the north-west corner of the Cape, a cast-iron tower dating from the 1870s on a station established in 1816. Reaching it means either two miles of soft sand from Race Point Beach, which takes most people an hour each way and is hard work, or an over-sand vehicle permit, or a dune tour that goes that way. The keeper's house has in recent years taken overnight guests through a preservation group, which is worth checking if the idea appeals. Open house days run in summer.

Wood End Light and Long Point Light are square brick towers at the harbour mouth, both from the 1870s, and they are reached by one of the better walks on the Cape. A stone breakwater leaves the west end of Commercial Street and carries you roughly a mile over marsh and tidal flat toward Wood End. It is granite blocks rather than a path, laid unevenly, and crossing it means stepping from block to block for thirty to forty-five minutes. Check the tide before you start: the near end floods, and people do get caught. Wood End is a further walk over sand from the end of the breakwater, and Long Point is another mile and a half beyond that at the very tip of the spit.

The soft option is the seasonal shuttle boat across Provincetown Harbor to Long Point, which lands you near the light and saves the breakwater. Walk one way and take the boat back if you can time it. The view from Long Point back at the town, with the Pilgrim Monument above the roofs, is the best angle on Provincetown there is.