Seashaken Houses

Interesting and evocative, reminded me a little of some of the scenes evoked in Endurance

It was common, he says, to be interrupted by the thump of a wave racing over the window inches from his face, 60 feet above sea level. Lying prone was the best way to feel the tower shudder in a storm.

Instead, there is one last landfall 28 miles south-west of the mainland: the Scilly Isles, an idyllic archipelago of five inhabited islands – St Mary’s, St Martin’s, St Agnes, Tresco and Bryher – and countless uninhabited islets. Irregularly shaped, randomly clustered, they are like a geological encore before the ocean.

That a tower like the Bishop can ‘dance upon its foundations’, as Lewis so beautifully put it, defies logic, confounds the senses. That its structural integrity is unaffected by this movement – as the recent Eddystone study seems to indicate – only deepens the sense of mystery. This surreal behaviour shakes our concept of a building, and gives these mighty structures an unexpected vulnerability.