Fourchu Head Lighthouse

The current Fourchu Head Lighthouse is a square skeletal tower carrying red and white daymark panels, roughly 30 feet tall, serving as an active automated aid-to-navigation on the remote, rugged coast of Richmond County. It replaced an earlier fibreglass tower sometime between 2011 and 2021 — the exact date is unrecorded, but photographs document the white fibreglass tower still on station in 2011 and the present skeletal tower by 2021. The light shows a white flash and the site retains its 1956 one-storey wood fog signal building.

Fourchu Head I was established in 1907 as a square wood tower, painted white and standing 32 feet high, marking the entrance to Forchu Harbour on Cape Breton's southeastern shore. The exposed headland took a heavy toll on the wooden tower, which was replaced in the 1980s by Fourchu Head II — a circular white fibreglass tower with two narrow red bands and no lantern, the design recorded by the Nova Scotia Lighthouse Preservation Society. That fibreglass tower in turn gave way to today's skeletal structure, a pattern repeated at many remote Coast Guard stations where low-maintenance daymark towers now stand in for older lights.

Reaching Fourchu Head is an expedition rather than a drive-up visit. The tower sits on the point about 18 kilometres southwest of Louisbourg, reachable by a fairly strenuous coastal hike from the South Fourchu waterfront. The site is open year-round while the tower itself is closed, and the reward is one of Cape Breton's wildest stretches of shoreline — sheer headland, open Atlantic swell and seabird colonies along the Fleur-de-lis Trail coast.