Gay Head Cliffs

Interesting facts

In 1805 the first lighthouse keeper above the cliffs asked for a pay rise, complaining that coloured clay blown up from the cliff face kept coating the lantern glass.

Named Gay Head in 1870 for the vivid colours of its cliffs, the town voted in 1997 to become Aquinnah by just 79 votes to 76.

The first light above the cliffs, an octagonal wooden tower lit in November 1799, was the first lighthouse ever built on Martha's Vineyard.

The light was meant to warn ships off Devil's Bridge, a reef of submerged rocks off the cliffs in a passage later estimated to carry some 80,000 vessels a year.

The French-made first-order Fresnel lens installed in 1856 won a gold medal at the 1855 Paris World's Fair before it was shipped to the island.

Hauling the lens's 60 frames of glass prisms and machinery across the island to the cliffs reportedly took 40 yoke of oxen.

In 1874 the light's signal became three white flashes and one red, so that sailors could tell it apart from the lights at Sankaty Head and Montauk Point.

Charles Vanderhoop, keeper from 1920 to 1933, was the only Aquinnah Wampanoag ever to tend the lighthouse officially.

The beach at the foot of the cliffs is named after Moshup, the Wampanoag giant credited in tradition with shaping much of the island's landscape.

The Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah), owners of the cliffs, gained federal recognition in 1987.

Why it is worth it

At the western tip of Martha's Vineyard the land ends in a wall of clay striped like a geological textbook: white kaolin sand, black lignite, red, ochre and grey-green clays, all exposed on one of the rare Atlantic shores in New England that faces west, toward the sunset. After heavy rain, clay washed from the face tints the surf below in the same colours. The cliffs were designated a National Natural Landmark by the National Park Service in 1965.

The layers are far older than the island itself. Most were deposited in the Cretaceous and the Tertiary, when this part of the coast was a low plain crossed by rivers, deltas and shallow seas. During the last ice ages advancing glaciers bulldozed into that plain and shoved the old beds upward, tilting and folding them so that some now stand almost on end; the final ice sheet left a cap of boulder-studded till on top. The greensand beds have yielded fossils of sharks, whales and seals, as well as fragments of land animals such as camels, horses and mastodons. The sea keeps cutting back the face, and the beaches below have been shrinking for decades.

The cliffs belong to the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah), for whom this headland is ancestral land, and are protected jointly with the town of Aquinnah and local conservation bodies. In 1997 the town voted to replace the name Gay Head with Aquinnah, a Wampanoag word meaning "land under the hill". Wampanoag tradition attributes much of the island's landscape to Moshup, a giant ancestral figure. Above the cliffs stands Gay Head Light, a conical brick tower of 1856 that once held a first-order Fresnel lens; in 2015 the whole lighthouse was moved about 129 feet inland to keep it from falling with the eroding edge.

Getting there

The cliffs are on Martha's Vineyard, so the mainland town of Fairhaven, about 32 km away in a straight line, is across open water. The island is reached by ferry, year-round from Woods Hole to Vineyard Haven, which lies about 23 km northeast of the cliffs. The nearest airport is Martha's Vineyard Airport (MVY) on the island, about 19 km away; on the mainland, New Bedford Regional Airport (EWB) is about 38 km away across the water.

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

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