Gay Head Lighthouse

The brick tower at Aquinnah went up in the 1850s to replace an earlier wooden structure already being swallowed by the eroding Gay Head cliffs — and in 2015, engineers moved it again, about 135 feet back from the cliff face, buying it more time. The land beneath it belongs to the Wampanoag, who have held it as ancestral territory since long before Congress approved $570 to build the first lighthouse here in 1799.