The Lighthouse Stevensons - Bella Bathurst [86]
That same evening, he set sail for Tiree. The weather was still too foul to land on Skerryvore, but from the boat’s deck he could see the destruction for himself. It was, he found, just as Mr Hogben had specified. The beams supporting the barrack had disappeared, the iron stancheons had been ripped from the rock or twisted beyond repair, the smith’s forge had vanished, and the anvil had been thrown about eight yards to the south-west. The mason’s tools, the quarrying equipment and several moulds had either been smashed to pieces or stolen by the sea, and the grindstone had been hurled from the top of the rock into a gully at the bottom. The two crabs (small cranes, or derricks, for lifting) had both been dashed on the rocks, the mooring buoy had gone and a large iron ring used to haul weights had been yanked from the rock into the sea. A loose boulder measuring three-quarters of a ton had been shifted from the base of the rock to the top. Alan stared at the fragments, and then turned away. The journey back to Hynish, ‘in all the gloom of a stormy night, and depressed by mingled disappointment and sad forebodings’, was not an easy one. The workmen, he noted, were ‘very sick and much dispirited’, and seemed almost as upset by the disaster as Alan himself. Alan returned to Edinburgh, and wearily began redesigning his plans.
The construction of the remodelled barracks, strengthened, bolted and anchored to a different site on the rock with every last beam and nail that Alan could find, occupied a good part of 1839. Almost nothing of the previous season’s work could be salvaged except for the bore-holes made in the rock and a few pieces of flotsam that floated ashore at Hynish some time later. All that remained of the old barracks, as Alan noted, was part of a beam attached to one of the iron stancheons, ‘so thoroughly riven and shaken as to be quite like a bundle of lathwood’. Meanwhile, Alan busied himself with cutting and moulding the stones from the new quarry on Mull, blasting the foundation pit for the light and constructing a proper mooring on the rock. These tasks also took almost a whole year.
The new pink Mull granite might have been more malleable than the Tiree gneiss, but the business of blasting, dressing and finishing the stones, and then shipping them twenty-six miles to Hynish was still a painstaking job. At the quarry, the workmen bored holes in the rock, primed them with powder like an old musket gun and then bolted for the nearest refuge as several hundred tons of granite exploded behind them. Once prepared, each block weighed between three-quarters of a ton and two and a half tons, and even when Alan had dispensed with his father’s dovetailed cuts they still required careful cutting and shaping. He was perfectionist enough to insist that no stone should be more than an eighth of an inch out of line. As he pointed out to Robert, he wanted to complete ‘every work of a preliminary nature in as substantial a manner as possible so as to secure to ourselves the advantage of entering next season unencumbered by the drawbacks of other works upon the two great operations of landing and building.’ Even so, such pedantic standards meant slow progress. Alan later calculated that it had taken around 120 hours to dress a single stone for the outside of the tower, and 320 hours to dress a single one of the central stones. In total, 5,000 tons of stone were quarried, shaped and shipped. The whole operation lasted almost a year and a half.
Once out on Skerryvore,