The Storm Tower at Compass Point in Bude will be relocated a few hundred feet inland after the Bude-Stratton town council was awarded a National Lottery Heritage Fund grant of £249,362.

The painstaking process of taking apart the 190-year-old tower will begin on April 24. It will be rebuilt more than 100 metres inland.

It is not the first time the tower has been dismantled. It was shifted in 1881 during some of the most savage weather in centuries, when hundreds of people were killed.

The 30-foot-tall octagonal tower, a few metres from the cliff edge, needs to be moved before coastal erosion causes its destruction.

The council said the work would be carried out by Sally Strachey Historic Conservation. The tower was designed by George Wightwick in 1835 for Sir Thomas Acland, the landowner, as a refuge for the coastguard.