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By Root 723 0

tide and only partially exposed at low tide, so Robert and his staff were forced to play a nervous game of waiting with the sea and the weather. Lighthouses were not Robert’s only preoccupation, however. ‘Scotland itself,’ as a biographer of his grandson later remarked, ‘was his drawing board.’ He was also responsible for the construction of the east side of Edinburgh, driving a route from Prince’s Street to the Calton Hill and constructing the Georgian order of Waterloo Place and Regent Road. Robert was also a man of a most particular mood and time, a self-made bootstrap businessman who, like many of his engineering contemporaries, used the opportunities of the post-Enlightenment world to haul himself out of poverty and into society. He placed his faith in improvement and industry, and remained to the end a devout believer in the most conservative of virtues. He was, according to Louis, ‘a man of the most zealous industry, greedy of occupation, greedy of knowledge, a stern husband of time, a reader, a writer, unflagging in his task of self-improvement.’ Louis, it would seem, was not the only person to be daunted by him.

Robert had three sons who became engineers, Alan, David and Thomas. Alan was a classical scholar, musical, gifted and noted for his early championing of Wordsworth. Nevertheless, he suppressed the artistic side of himself to go into the family firm, becoming, like his father before him, the Commissioner of the Board of Northern Lights. He is remembered as a shrewd and brilliant engineer, whose greatest professional triumph was the construction of Skerryvore lighthouse on a ragged clump of rocks twelve miles west of Tiree. As Sir Walter Scott noted when he visited the site, ‘It will be a most desolate position for a lighthouse – the Bell Rock and Eddystone a joke to it.’ The light took five years to build, and, despite a fire in the 1950s, still stands today. Louis considered it ‘the noblest of all extant deep-sea lights’.

David Stevenson took up Alan’s position on his retirement. His greatest achievement was the construction of the light at Muckle Flugga, the most northerly of all the Scottish lighthouses. Constructed as a temporary light to aid British naval convoys on their way to the Crimea, it was placed on the summit of a wave-washed miniature Matterhorn. Westminster insisted that the light should be working within six months; David’s exceptional skill as an engineer ensured that, even with winter seas crashing 200 feet over the rock, it was finished in time.

Thomas Stevenson, Louis’s father, was responsible for the construction of twenty-seven on-shore and twenty-five offshore lighthouses. He built the light at Dhu Heartach, an isolated mass of rock off the coast of Mull, which Louis later used as source material for Kidnapped. At one point during its construction, fourteen men were trapped for five days in a temporary barracks while a ferocious gale pounded the rock. Louis records the foreman desperately playing his fiddle to quell the sound of the sea’s rage. Thomas is also remembered for having taken Fresnel’s optical developments several stages further, harnessing the strange new science of electricity and building a series of revolving lights in a bright and sturdy circuit which finally enclosed the whole of Scotland. Thomas was ‘a man of somewhat antique strain’, recalled Louis after his death, ‘with a blended sternness and softness that was wholly Scottish and at first somewhat bewildering; with a profound essential melancholy of disposition and (what often accompanies it) the most humorous geniality in company; shrewd and childish; passionately attached, passionately prejudiced; a man of many extremes, many faults of temper, and no very stable foothold for himself among life’s troubles.’ For much of the time, he was working in conjunction with David. The two brothers complemented each other well; David tended towards details, Thomas towards inventiveness. Both were also preoccupied with more prosaic matters, including the establishment of precise and reliable systems for constructing, surveying,