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By Root 664 0

which, when roused, could hurl several hundred tons of water at anything in their way. Every one of the rock lighthouses in Scotland was built with stone walls at least nine feet thick at the base; anything less, and they would not have lasted the first gale of winter. To build something under such pressures at a time when the only materials available were stone, wood, glass and metal was nothing short of miraculous. There was no concrete, or cranes, or hydraulic lifting equipment; there were no helicopters or pneumatic drills. Dynamite was a new and fickle builder’s tool to be treated with extreme caution. Mortar was strong but unpredictable, requiring expert mixing and split-second timing. Haulage, in many cases, was provided by horses, who did not take kindly to precipitous cliffs and needed as much tending as any of the workmen. Equipment and materials were brought by sailboat, which ran exactly the same risks as any other ship. As the early engineers discovered, building 130-foot pillars in the middle of a hostile ocean required skills and tools that had not yet been invented. As often as not, they had to make it up as they went along.

From its slow beginnings, the organisation of lights was divided by nation: the English, the Scots and the Irish all had, and still have, separate administrations. The English service, which was founded in 1514 as the Most Glorious and Undivided Trinity of St Clement in the Parish of Deptford Strond in the County of Kent (later foreshortened to Trinity House), developed in piecemeal fashion. For a period of 300 years or so, most of its lights were built and maintained by individuals who had been granted charters. Although it did mean that the most hazardous parts of the English coast were lit, the lights’ construction was erratic and their maintenance wayward. Pepys, who was Master of Trinity House from 1676 to 1689, found private charters disgraceful. While still at the Admiralty, he wrote critically of ‘the evil of having lights raised for the profit of private men, not for the good of the public seamen, their widows and orphans’. In theory, the private owners could build, light and staff the towers in any way they chose in return for a small annual rent. Several were taken over by Trinity House once the lease had expired or had become suitably profitable. By 1800, the combination of extortionate private dues and inconsistent public ones was causing uproar among shipowners plying the English coastline. The situation had, in effect, become a form of legalised extortion: by 1818, Trinity House was reaping an annual profit of around £50,000. The few attempts to reform the situation usually resulted in an undignified tussle between Trinity House, the Crown and the landowners for a portion of the money. It was not until 1836 that Trinity House bought back all the lighthouses in private hands, an undertaking which cost them over £1 million.

The Scottish lights, by contrast, were almost all built within the space of a century. The archetypal lighthouse on its lonely rock in a lonely sea is largely the product of a Scottish imagination and a Scottish sense of endeavour. Augustin Fresnel’s nineteenth-century refinements to oil lighting and high-powered lenses were matched by equally significant developments in lighthouse construction and marine technology. The Stevenson family took up the challenge of their times, blended it with the scientific breakthroughs of their day and brought both to a point of near-perfection. As Louis later noted, engineering ‘was not a science then. It was a living art, and it visibly grew under the eyes and between the hands of its practitioners.’

In 1786 Louis’s grandfather, Robert, went into partnership with his stepfather Thomas Smith, then the Engineer to the Board of Northern Lighthouses. The two began replacing the flickering and unreliable fires first with oil lamps and later with a system of fixed lights using either gas or oil. In 1807, Robert started work on the Bell Rock, a vicious granite reef off the coast of Arbroath. The reef was submerged at high