Spotted on August bank holiday Sunday in 2023 the THV Alert was heading for the Solent. With her smart blue hull and white superstructure, she slipped quietly past Milford beach heading towards the Hurst Narrows.

THV Alert heading for the Hurst Narrows, August 2023   © Tricia Hayne

At just 39.3m long, the Alert is the smallest of three vessels operated by the maritime organisation Trinity House: THV Alert, THV Patricia, and THV Galatea.  With a top speed of 17 knots, and classed as a rapid-intervention vessel, the Alert is focused primarily on the south-east coast of England, where her ability to respond following an incident at sea is put to good use.

On a day-to-day basis, all three ships are involved in the core work of Trinity House: maintaining some 450 buoys and a total of 66 lighthouses around the shores of England, Wales, the Channel Islands and Gibraltar. ‘Routinely steaming skilfully into sea areas that all other ships are warned to steer clear of’ (www.trinityhouse.co.uk), they are also deployed in inspecting thousands of other buoys that are maintained by the likes of oil-rig or wind-farm operators.

Closer to home, ‘our’ lighthouses – Hurst Point and the Needles – are both owned by Trinity House. Rising 26m from the shingle beach at the end of the spit commanded by Hurst Castle, the current Hurst Point Lighthouse was built in 1867, eight years after the construction of the Needles Lighthouse on the opposite side of the western Solent. Both are inspected annually by one of the Trinity House ships, as are their navigational buoys in the western Solent, which include Warden, North East Shingles and Sconce – all marking the Hurst Narrows.

Inspections apart, one day could see the Alert marking wrecks, another acting as a base for scientific research or even on guard duty for marine operations such as cable laying; she – like her sister ships – is available for hire.

So who pays for maintaining Britain’s aids to navigation?  In the early days of lighthouses, a tax was usually levied on passing merchant ships in return for assisting their safe passage.  Perhaps surprisingly, not much has changed, though nowadays the money comes from government ‘light dues’ paid by all commercial vessels calling at British ports, and then distributed by the Department of Transport.

When Trinity House was incorporated by Henry VIII in 1514 to regulate shipping on the River Thames, who could have foreseen that – more than 500 years later – her vessels would be regulating the safety of the waters around his castle?