Appropriately, “The Foghorn’s Lament” begins with a Requiem. Performed on a cliff in northeastern England in 2013, the Foghorn Requiem was created by a pair of multimedia artists and a composer (plus a cast of thousands). All round Britain, foghorns were being superannuated and closed down, and the coast was losing its signature tune. The Requiem was conceived as a celebration of the history of the foghorn. It involved three brass bands and a Dunkirk-type flotilla of over 50 boats of every description at sea, all armed with differently-tuned foghorns.

The piece de resistance was the “almighty” Souter Point foghorn: “two outsized trumpets” sitting on a squat white-washed building, their mouths “gaping like black doorways,” writes author Jennifer Lucy Allan, who was present as a journalist writing about underground and experimental music. (Currently, she is a BBC presenter and also writes for The Guardian.)

To say Allan’s musical tastes are eclectic is to understate the case. She appears to be happiest when her ears are being “sand-blasted” by huge volumes of sound. Since attending the Requiem, her “drug” of choice has become the foghorn, in all its many types and varieties. Just being in the engine room of one of these behemoths, the smell of “diesel, grease and Brasso,” is “heavenly.”

Newly obsessed with foghorns, she is determined to discover everything about the culture that goes with them: their sounds, their shapes, their history; the people who operated them, the scientists whose researches improved them, the towns and villages that had to put up with their noise. She sifts through obscure records about foghorns in a Glasgow library – “Aye, well I suppose somebody’s got to,” says a Glasgow librarian dryly – and spends a month (February) in a lonely lighthouse keeper’s cottage at the southern tip of the Shetland Islands. Quite literally, she now has a PhD in foghorns.

As she explores, Allan finds more and more to excite her interest. At iconic lighthouses, she exults in their voices. She burrows into dusty archives, researching the terrible shipwrecks that drove the search for effective ways to warn fogbound sailors off treacherous coasts. She is a fan of the picturesque language used in Victorian reports. John Tyndall (of the eponymous effect that makes the sky look blue) ascribed the unpredictability of how a foghorn blast will sound over distance to the “caprices of the atmosphere,” which she says sounds “charmingly like a mischievous child.”

The author takes these wells of often arcane knowledge as the foundation for a discussion that is far from a dry scholarly examination. It ranges from world history to the meaning of music. She is particularly fascinated by differences and the threshold over which one form changes to the other: from hot and cold layers that swirl about her body as she takes a midnight dip on the solstice, to the twin most common associations with foghorns, hope and fear. It is a motif that runs through the book. “Fog is threshold and fog is mood.”

As it spreads over the land and sea, the foghorn’s blast changes, absorbing and reabsorbing the echoes it picks up. The sound has also mellowed across time since it first disrupted the ears of coastal dwellers, for the most part negatively; their descendants now lament its loss. Although the foghorn’s lifespan was comparatively brief, it contributed its own stories to the fount of myths the coast has always inspired. As “urban legend and unsubstantiated anecdote,” they live on and multiply. Allan’s tenacity in pursuing her leads and methodically building connections to other connections turns some chapters of her book into metaphysical feasts.

“The Foghorn’s Lament” is a wonder-full book. How many people have ever heard of Trinity House, set up by Henry VIII?  It is the lighthouse board for England and Wales, not Scotland, but curiously, Gibraltar. The oldest by far, it is “more regal and more independent” than similar organizations around the world.

As well as her bottomless curiosity, Allan has a wonderful way of writing about her finds and the places she ends up. At the Lizard, the southernmost point in the British Isles, “the feral sea churns around the sharp black rocks that are like teeth in a rabid mouth.” Five hundred miles to the north, on the banks of the Clyde River, the foghorn’s voice is “marauding around the streets and rattling people’s windows like a poltergeist.”

“The Foghorn’s Lament,” Allan’s first book, is much more than a history of foghorns, extraordinary though that is. In the process of telling their story, Jennifer Lucy Allan leads the reader on a contemplative consideration of how humans approach change.

Thomas Urquhart is the author of “For the Beauty of the Earth: Birding, Opera and Other Journeys.” He lives in Portland.

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