The Lighthouse Stevensons - Bella Bathurst [115]
It would, he suggested, be a project as complex as Alan’s venture two decades earlier. The Torran reef was not an isolated hazard, as Skerryvore and the Bell Rock had been. It was a long, scattered archipelago of mainlands and islands stuck slap in the centre of a major shipping channel. The reef extended for around ten miles in total, and the surrounding area was cluttered with protruding stumps of rock, some lying underwater, some just above. The difficulty was not in finding a place on which to build, but the opposite problem. Tom could have lit the reef from end to end and still not been confident it was marked well enough. He therefore needed to pick his site with care, to ensure that the light would be seen from all approaches. In particular, it had to be visible to mariners sailing up the thin corridor to the Firth of Lorn and the lower end of the Sea of the Hebrides, which was prone to powerful currents. The number of outlying islands in the area and the driving Atlantic swell from the west pushed the unwary either towards the reef or towards the land nearby. Any ship that drifted into the area might avoid one rock only to be knocked to pieces against another. As Tom pointed out, the whole place was snared with natural traps as impassable as anything Alan or David had ever contended with, and nothing but the smallest row-boat could navigate the area with any hope of safety.
The site he eventually selected for a tower was a humpbacked lump of stone rising about 40 feet above high water mark and extending for 240 feet in length. The rock itself was a smooth black crest of seaworn basalt, slippery to walk on, but at least more pliable than the cramped gneiss of Skerryvore. The drawback was the difficulty in getting any purchase on the rock, since Dhu Heartach presented one sheer black mass rising from the waters without a landing place or sheltered creek from which to land materials or moor supply boats. After the intervention of Lloyds of London – one of the parties involved in governmental decisions on British waters – the Commissioners conceded the need for a light, and authorised Tom to start work. Tom’s designs for the tower followed Alan’s Skerryvore template in miniaturised form. The light was to be built 101 feet above foundation level to the parabolic curve (Skerryvore, by comparison, being 138 feet and hyperbolic), it would have seven floors and would be quarried from similar granite to that used by Alan. A shore station would be established on Earraid, a tiny isle connected to the Ross of Mull by a tide-washed spit of sand. Earraid was admittedly over fifteen miles away from the reef, but it was the nearest land available that provided shelter, a vantage point and a reasonable mooring place. As with the Bell Rock and Skerryvore, Tom intended to build an iron barracks in which the workmen could stay during the progress of the works. The whole undertaking, Tom calculated, would cost around £57,000, roughly the same as Alan’s initial estimate for Skerryvore.
The shore works, at least, progressed with gratifying speed. The stones were quarried, cut and shaped, and the workmen’s cottages completed in record time. Fifty men or so had set up permanent camp by the shore, under the charge of Robert’s old apprentice Alan Brebner. By the time Louis arrived in 1870, the settlement was well established. On the shore, he noted,
there was now a pier of stone, there were rows of sheds, railways, travelling-cranes, a street of cottages, an iron house for the resident engineer, wooden bothies for the men, a stage where the courses of the tower were put together experimentally, and behind the settlement a great gash in the hillside where granite was quarried. In the bay, the steamer lay at her moorings. All day long there hung about the