Around £10,000 of taxpayers’ money is being sought to keep a historic Fife lighthouse in the Kingdom while a more permanent home can be found.
The iconic red and white Beamer Rock Lighthouse has been stuck in storage for years after it was carefully dismantled in 2011 to make way for the Queensferry Crossing.
Various plans for making use of the landmark have been mooted but it has now emerged it will soon be effectively homeless because its present storage site is needed for other uses.
Members of the south and west Fife area committee will be asked next week to approve funding of £10,000 from the local community planning budget to relocate the structure to an alternative storage site.
Since being painstakingly removed by Transport Scotland in 2011, the Beamer Rock Lighthouse has been stored in a compound belonging to the consortium building the bridge.
Paul Vaughan, Fife Council’s head of communities and neighbourhoods service said: “The site where the lighthouse is presently stored is now required for other use.
“The lighthouse needs to be moved to another storage site.
“Members of staff from Fife Council’s economy, planning and employment services have contacted the community manager requesting that the relocation costs are met locally, and the only available monies to do this is the local community planning budget.”
In recent years, there have been many ideas presented to resurrect the Beamer Rock Lighthouse on the landscape.
These have included using it as a First World War memorial in North Queensferry, a memorial to witches in Torryburn or as part of housing developments at St David’s Harbour in Dalgety Bay.
More recently, there was talk of the Beamer Rock Lighthouse being a feature of plans for new housing at Prestonhill Quarry in Inverkeithing, with developers suggesting they were keen to incorporate the structure somewhere in their blueprint.
However, Mr Vaughan revealed none of the projects put forward are “sufficiently developed at this stage”.
The £10,000 funding, which will be split between ward one and ward six’s budget allocations, will assist with relocation costs as and when the time comes where the Beamer Rock Lighthouse needs to move.
The Stevenson-built structure, which was commissioned originally by Inverkeithing Town Council, stood in the Firth of Forth for 175 years before being removed in 2011 to make way for the Queensferry Crossing.
