Old Nash Point Lighthouse

Nash Point is a wild headland on the Monknash Coast in the Vale of Glamorgan, south Wales. A mile from Marcross, the cliffs drop to a small beach where walkers follow the coastal path toward Llantwit Major. Rare plants such as the tuberous thistle grow in the lighthouse meadow, a Site of Special Scientific Interest. Choughs wheel above the grass while fossils of ammonites and gryphaea lie in the Lias limestone cliffs. An Iron Age hillfort called Nash Point Camp once stood on the north side of Marcross Brook, but the sea has taken most of its remains. The lighthouse itself is a Grade II listed building built between 1831 and 1832 by James Walker, chief engineer for Trinity House. Two towers, one high and one low, once guided ships through the shifting Nash sandbank until the leading light was removed in the 1920s. The wreck of The Frolic in March 1831, which cost over fifty lives including that of Lt-Col N McLeod, prompted its construction. After electrification in 1968 it remained staffed until automation in 1998 made it Wales’s last manned lighthouse. Visitors walk the cliff paths to watch seabirds and scan the horizon for passing ships. Remains of the 1962 BP Driver wreck appear at low tide about 200 metres north of the beach access. The Jurassic mudstones offshore form Nash Bank beneath bands of sand and gravel, while the cliffs show twelve-thousand-year-old tufa and scree deposits. From the lighthouse meadow the view stretches along a coast where Iron Age forts once stood and rare snails still live in the slopes.