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sickness and guilt, while later keepers became distinctly reluctant to take up their postings to the Flannans. But this was not the only posting that proved unpopular in the service. Each light inevitably gained its own favour or notoriety, and certain postings became the NLB’s equivalent of exile to Siberia. Of the rock lights, Skerryvore was favoured, since, for a tower, it was comparatively roomy and even at high tide allowed brief constricted walks around the reef. During heavy storms, though, the light would sway and flex in the wind. With the roaring water and the deafening isolation the keepers felt much as if they were living among the topmost branches of a high tree, with the foundations creaking below, the sea banging on the windows and the ghostly flicker of white spray falling past the lantern room. Keepers were not generally a superstitious breed, but Skerryvore could terrify or exhilarate the most flat-minded of men.

The Bell Rock, where all keepers served an initial apprenticeship, still carried its old prestigious veneer, but had less opportunity for exercise. Muckle Flugga was fondly regarded, since it was comparatively spacious and gave a grandstand view of the most spectacular seas in Scotland. Dhu Heartach and Chicken Rock (built by Tom and David off the coast of the Isle of Man) were resented for being small, cramped and uncomfortable. In the worst lights, so the myth went, the keepers developed peglegs from eternally climbing in circles and curved spines from sleeping in circular bunks. Some apprentice keepers got to the lights and found they couldn’t bear the remoteness. Bruce Brown, the last keeper at Duncansby Head, remembers ‘The rock stations, a molehill becomes a mountain. There’s been supers [trainees] on these places, and they went melancholy. There was one super at Dhu Heartach – they called it the Black Hole at one time – and he got so bad he got down on the grating, he was going to dive off and swim ashore.’

But the loneliness of a lightkeeper’s life is a myth. After the 1820s no light ever had fewer than three attendants. Thus the problem for new keepers was not in adjusting to solitude, but in living for a long time in a small room with a stranger. Too much of a liking for one’s own company was, in fact, actively discouraged. A troubled correspondence took place in 1857 between George Street and the principal keeper William Primrose at the Calf of Man light, whose assistant keeper John Alexander, ‘a very treacherous and dangerous man to be at large’, was showing alarming signs of ‘mental excitement’. Alex Cuningham, Secretary of the NLB, wrote worriedly to a local doctor, ‘He has all along manifested in his conduct towards the other lightkeepers a misanthropic tendency. You will of course keep in view that a Lightkeeper has nightly several hours of solitary watching, and the serious consequences which might result from a momentary ebullition of mental derangement.’ Having examined the patient, Dr Underwood wrote back, perplexed. Alexander was ‘extremely eccentric’, and the doctor himself noted that he took ‘long walks into the country in search of a wife with money. He says she must have at least £2,000 and be able to perform well on the Piano and speak French fluently.’ A few days previously, Alexander claimed that a large poker had fallen on his head, though the other keepers could find no sign of injury. Mrs Primrose, however, had become so worried by the threat of violence that she had become quite hysterical. Underwood judged that ‘Alexander is labouring under a peculiar morbid state of mind, and I think it advisable he should appear before the Board.’ Alexander was sacked and returned to his home town of Wick. It is not known whether he ever recovered, or ever found his musical wife.

The high point of the lighthouse service was the paraffin age, the eighty or so years between 1870 and 1950 when the majority of lights used paraffin rather than oil or electricity for fuel. The engineering had reached its technical zenith, the fuel burned cleanly and without interference, the