Workshop tours

Visitors are welcome on the workshop floor, but only on a guided tour, because the coil-winding loft is full of fine wire and the glass room is hot. Tours run on Thursdays only, starting at 10:15, and last about ninety minutes.

A place on a workshop tour costs €23.40 per person. Children under twelve go free with an adult. Each tour takes at most nine guests, so please book ahead through the letters desk; we confirm by return and hold the place until the Wednesday before.

Tours meet at the green door on the harbour side of the rope-walk on Cobbler's Mole. The tour begins in the glass room, where salt-glass is cut and annealed, continues up to the coil loft, and ends on the test jetty, where every finished lantern is charged by a real tide before it is packed.

Wear closed shoes. Photographs are welcome everywhere except the coil loft, where the flash from a camera has been known to distract a winder at exactly the wrong moment.