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By Root 725 0

must have happened about a week ago.’ When Moore had reached the light, he had found no sign of life. The kitchen door was open, the fire laid but unlit, the beds empty and crumpled. The light itself was in perfect working order, the fuel supply full and the lamp freshly cleaned. On their return the next day, the same small group searched the island from end to end, still finding no sign of life. The log books had been maintained until a week previously, noting several days’ worth of unexceptionable weather. Plates and cutlery in the kitchen had all been cleaned and left to dry, and the keepers’ oilskins and seaboots were missing from the passageway. The only evidence of anything amiss was near the landing place to the light. By the cliff edge, where equipment for landing supplies would usually be stored, the party discovered several of the ropes and a box containing landing tackle missing and the iron railings guarding the footpath bent out of shape or wrenched from their foundations. A block of stone weighing at least a ton had somehow fallen several feet from the top of the cliff to the landing stage and a lifebuoy stored 110 feet above sea level had disappeared completely.

No absolute conclusion has ever been reached about the fate of the Flannan Isles keepers. The incident became the subject of fascinated national speculation and the source of several scandalous rumours. It was suggested that one of the keepers was an alcoholic who had pushed the other two over the cliff edge while drunk, that the three were involved in a soured love-affair, and even that one of the keepers had got God, and dragged his colleagues into the sea in a fit of religious contrition. Later rumours suggested all three had been abducted by extraterrestrials. The writer Wilfred Gibson wrote a poem shortly afterwards, speculating that an ancient curse on the island had turned the three keepers into black, raven-like birds. His contribution did nothing to silence the rumours.

The NLB and those who found the deserted light, however, held to a more realistic theory. In his official investigation for the Commissioners, lighthouse Superintendent Robert Muirhead concluded that ‘After a careful examination of the place, the railings, ropes etc, and weighing all the evidence which I could secure, I am of the opinion that the most likely explanation of the disappearance of the three men is that they had all gone down on the afternoon of Saturday 15th December to the proximity of the west landing, to secure the box with the mooring ropes etc. and that an unexpectedly large roller had come up on the island, and a large body of water going up higher than where they were and coming down upon them had swept them away with resistless force. I have considered and discussed the possibility of the men being blown away by the wind, but, as the wind was westerly, I am of the opinion notwithstanding its great force, that the more probable explanation is that they have been washed away as, had the wind caught them, it would from its direction, have blown them up the island and I feel certain they would have managed to throw themselves down before they had reached the summit or brow of the island.’ Freak waves are not such an improbable explanation. As Thomas Stevenson’s experiments on Shetland had proved, the seas around the west coast of Scotland could touch the summit of the highest cliff, break up twenty-ton rocks with a flick of salt water and roar unbroken over 200-foot heights. Even on relatively calm days, the pulse of swell and tide produces occasional rogue waves bearing down on the surrounding land. Many of the last generation of keepers testify to alarming encounters with freak waves. Perhaps the peculiarity of the Flannan Isles incident was not that the sea had reached 110 feet up to where they were standing, ripped the railings from their roots and seized the men standing there, but that not one of the three was able to save himself.

The tragedy affected the rest of the service profoundly. Those who had found the deserted light suffered from bouts of