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By Root 742 0

and flickering technology. The only break is for a tiny kitchen (as cosily fitted as anyone could wish) and two cramped little rooms, containing narrow bunk beds and a portholed window. Up and up, one ascends past more machinery, more ladders, more clutter, and finally to the light room. Outside, the wind thuds against the walls. From the balcony rail, there is a sudden overwhelming landscape of faraway islands and ocean. At your feet lie hundreds of dead birds, guillemots and gulls, blackbirds and curlews. During the migrating season, the lantern becomes an immense candle courted by giant moths. The birds flock in such huge numbers here that it is considered too dangerous to go out on the balcony. Up above, past the cranes and aerials, is the diamond-patterned lantern. Inside, three circular lenses revolve silently round the light, catching and refracting the weak daylight so the bulb appears by turns large and small, large and small. A cardboard box on the floor contains a few replacements, each the size of a punctured rugby ball.

A fire during the 1950s gutted much of Skerryvore. Automation took the rest. All that remains of its creator is a few wrought-iron sea serpents holding up a railing in the lantern, and the tower itself. That tower is still extraordinary. Walk slowly around the curve of the base, and it looks for all the world as if it grew from the rocks of its own accord. The dips and summits of the reef fit the walls so closely that it is difficult to work out which parts are nature and which artifice. The first few courses are black Tiree gneiss, as organic as the roots of an old tree. Further up, the stone is pinkish. From a distance it looks like the last surviving remnant of a petrified forest. Skerryvore has been described as the most beautiful lighthouse in the world. It is twelve miles from the nearest land, and was built to be avoided.

If you take the more conventional route to Skerryvore, you catch a different angle. The daily CalMac ferry from Oban to Tiree passes round the Sound of Mull, stops at Coll and then docks finally near a broad sweep of honey-coloured beach. Tiree is a treeless island, beaten almost flat by the winds hurtling overhead on their way to the mainland. At the far end of Gott beach, beyond the bright insect wings of the wind-surfers, is a ramp of black rocks and a few scattered houses. The shore is thick with flotsam – plastic bottles, old nylon rope, fishboxes, margarine tubs. Buried in the coarse grass every few yards is a rusty iron buoy, solid as a bomb. At the other end of the island, past the holiday-cottage blackhouses with their humpbacked roofs, is Hynish. There’s a picturesque cove with a pristine harbour, several sturdy workmen’s cottages, recently restored and now used for Outward Bound courses, and a lacework of stone walls, crumbling in places but still intact. At the top of a small hummock is a squat tower shaped like the butt-end of a Victorian castle. Inside the staircase winds upwards past a succession of fading posters and photographs – illustrations of building works, pictures of bowler-hatted workmen, a Scotsman obituary to an engineer. An immense bell lies in a corner stamped with the imprint of a lighthouse and the words ‘In Salutem Omnium’. At the top are a collection of museum pieces, a silvery argand lamp with its wick still unlit, a storm lantern and a pair of binoculars fixed against the wall gazing blindly out towards the sea. The place looks deserted save for the lone staggering inhabitant of the keepers’ cottages walking his dog round the houses again and again.

A little beyond there is a beach known incongruously as Happy Valley. The rocks which surround it have been rolled by the sea into fantastical shapes, such as chairs, shelves, pools, secret hiding places. It is a very different place from the curvaceous surfers’ haven on the other side of the island. There is no sand here and no flotsam, only the sea and the wind. Up above the beach is a black promontory of rock scattered with fragments of seashell and grass nibbled close by the ubiquitous