Six stops, one mile of cobbles and quayside, walked entirely by lantern light. The route begins and ends at the Old Harbourmaster's Steps.
Our lantern is lit at the water's edge, where the fishing fleet once moored three deep. Locals swear the dockyard bell still tolls on the anniversary of the '61 wreck — rung, they say, by hands that never made it back to shore.
Behind these shuttered windows, a customs clerk was found at his desk one morning in 1877, ledger open, pen still in hand — and no cause of death was ever recorded. Some nights, the ink on that page is said to still be wet.
The keeper's wife kept the light burning for a husband whose ship never returned. Long after her own passing, the lamp has twice been found turning at midnight — though the mechanism, and the town, insist that is quite impossible.
Once the loudest tavern on the harbour, the Rest poured its last pint in 1889. Passers-by still report the low murmur of a crowded taproom through boarded windows — and the smell of pipe smoke where none has been lit in a century.
The harbour's oldest burial ground, reserved for sailors lost at sea and buried without their bodies. Empty coffins, full headstones — and, our guide insists, the occasional footstep keeping pace with the group along the gravel path.
The walk ends where it began, at the office of a harbourmaster who logged every ship in and out of Blackwater for forty years — including, in his final entry, one that never officially existed. His lamp, tradition holds, is never allowed to go out.