Inchkeith

Inchkeith

Gaelic name	Innse Coit
Meaning of name	wooded island or Coeddi's island
Location
Inchkeith Inchkeith shown within the Firth of Forth
OS grid reference	NT293826
Coordinates	56°02′00″N 3°08′06″W / 56.033333°N 3.135°W / 56.033333; -3.135
Physical geography
Island group	Islands of the Forth
Area	22.9 hectares (57 acres)
Highest elevation	60 m
Administration
Sovereign state	United Kingdom
Country	Scotland
Council area	Fife
Demographics
Population	0
References

Inchkeith Lighthouse

Inchkeith Lighthouse
Scotland
Location	Inchkeith Fife  Scotland  United Kingdom
Coordinates	56°02′00″N 3°08′12″W / 56.033232°N 3.136643°W / 56.033232; -3.136643
Year first constructed	1804
Automated	1986
Construction	stone tower
Tower shape	cylindrical tower with balcony and lantern attached to a 2-storey keeper’s house
Markings / pattern	ochre tower and building, black lantern
Height	19 metres (62 ft)
Focal height	67 metres (220 ft)
Light source	diesel engineers
Intensity	269,280 candela
Range	22 nautical miles (41 km; 25 mi)
Characteristic	Fl W 15s.
Admiralty number	A2912
NGA number	2388
ARLHS number	SCO-107
Managing agent	Forth Ports

Forth Ports

Inchkeith (from the Scottish Gaelic: Innis Cheith) is an island in the Firth of Forth, Scotland, administratively part of the Kinghorn parish of the county of Fife.

Inchkeith has had a colourful history as a result of its proximity to Edinburgh and strategic location for use as home for a lighthouse and for military purposes defending the Firth of Forth from attack from shipping, and more recently protecting the upstream Forth Bridge and Rosyth Dockyard. Inchkeith has, by some accounts, been inhabited (intermittently) for almost 1,800 years.

Inchkeith is approximately half the size of the Isle of May at the mouth of the Firth, but is higher.

Although most of the island is of volcanic origin, the island’s geology is surprisingly varied. As well as the igneous rock, there are also some sections of sandstone, shale, coal and limestone. The shale contains a great number of fossils. There are several springs on the island.

The island has the lowest average rainfall in Scotland at 550 millimetres (21.7 in) annually.

The island has an abundance of springs, as noted by James Grant. James Boswell noted two wells on the island during his visit, and speculated as to the former existence of a third within the Castle.

The name "Inchkeith" may derive from the medieval Scottish Gaelic Innse Coit, meaning "wooded island". The latter element coit, in Old Welsh coet, is from the Proto-Celtic *cēto-, "wood". The late 9th century Sanas Cormaic, authored by Cormac mac Cuilennáin, suggests that the word had disappeared from the Gaelic of Ireland by that period, becoming coill; he states "coit coill isin chombric", that is, "coit is Welsh for wood", and explains that the Irish place-name Sailchoit is partly derived from Welsh. Although Scottish Gaelic was closer to Brythonic than Irish was, the Life of St Serf (written before 1180) calls the island Insula Keð, suggesting the possibility that the specific element in Inchkeith was not comprehensible to that hagiography's anonymous author or translator; if we could be sure that the author was Scottish, rather than an English or French incomer, this could be taken to mean that the word was probably not comprehensible even in Fife Gaelic in the 12th century. Since Gaelic had all but disappeared as a language spoken natively in southern Fife by the mid-14th century, there is no continuous Gaelic tradition for the name, but the modern form is Innis Cheith.