The Morris Island Lighthouse has stood 161 feet above the Atlantic since 1876, but its foundation no longer touches dry land. Erosion claimed the surrounding dunes by the 1930s, leaving the brick tower marooned 1,600 feet offshore in the surf off Folly Beach. What was once a working beacon guiding vessels into Charleston Harbor is now a skeletal monument to coastal change, its black-and-white daymark visible from miles across Lighthouse Inlet Heritage Preserve. The tower never lit again after the Coast Guard decommissioned it in 1962, yet it remains the most photographed maritime structure along South Carolina's Lowcountry shore. Morris Island Lighthouse boat tours depart from Folly Beach marina slips and Charleston Harbor wharves, threading the narrow channels between barrier islands where bottlenose dolphins hunt schools of mullet in the shallows. Eco-focused expeditions circle the tower's barnacle-crusted base at low tide, close enough to count the iron rungs ascending the exterior and see the cracked lens room at the summit. Naturalist guides identify osprey nests on the gallery rail and explain how Save The Light, a grassroots preservation coalition, has armored the foundation with riprap to slow the Atlantic's advance. Sunset departures time their approach for the hour when horizontal light renders the tower's weathered masonry in sharp relief against the indigo fetch beyond. The lighthouse replaced an 1837 predecessor that collapsed into the sea in 1876, a victim of the same littoral drift that now threatens its successor. Engineers sited the new tower 1,200 feet inland from the high-water mark, confident the dunes would endure. Within sixty years the beach had migrated westward, swallowing the keeper's cottage and oil house. Today the structure occupies a liminal zone: too far from shore for land access, too shallow for large vessels, reachable only by shallow-draft skiffs and kayaks during favorable tides. Charter operators navigate the approach by reading the color of the water, avoiding the shoals that shift with every winter nor'easter. The tower's survival depends on continued intervention—steel pilings, concrete grout, and the vigilance of volunteers who monitor every crack in the masonry. For visitors aboard expedition boats, the lighthouse offers a stark lesson in impermanence, framed by the same tidal forces that shaped the Lowcountry's marsh labyrinths and hammock islands over millennia.