The Lighthouse Stevensons - Bella Bathurst [98]
Tom took vast pleasure in his discoveries, and later provided the lightkeepers on the Bell Rock and Skerryvore with logbooks in which, to their evident perplexity, they were instructed to record regular measurements. His fascination was later to pay useful dividends, though his relations were unimpressed by Tom’s apparent capacity for paddling endlessly at the seaside and calling it work. As his son Louis later wrote in Records of a Family of Engineers, ‘He would pass hours on the beach, brooding over the waves, counting them, noting their least deflection, noting when they broke. On Tweedside, or by Lyne or Manor, we have spent together whole afternoons; to me, at the time, extremely wearisome; to him, as I am now sorry to think, bitterly mortifying. The river was to me a pretty and various spectacle; I could not see – I could not be made to see – it otherwise. To my father it was a chequer-board of lively forces, which he traced from pool to shallow with minute appreciation and enduring interest…It was to me like school in holidays; but to him, until I had worn him out with my invincible triviality, a delight.’ Robert was more cryptic but equally damning. By the side of a squiggly, ink-blotted sketch of wave-formations in Tom’s Skerryvore notebook, Robert wrote ‘Perfectly Unintelligible’.
Once the harbour, dock and sluicing system at Hynish were finished and the lens fitted, Tom was free to take his experiments elsewhere. In December 1843, a notice was posted in the Scottish newspapers warning interested parties of a new light on the Skerryvore rocks to be displayed from the beginning of February 1844, ‘and every Night thereafter, from sunset to sunrise’. Alan also drew up a careful specification of the light for the use of all shipping in the area. ‘The Skerryvore light will be known to Mariners as a Revolving Light,’ he wrote, ‘producing a Bright Flash once every minute. The lantern, which is open all round, is elevated 150 feet above the level of the sea. In clear weather the flashes of the Light will be seen at the distance of six leagues, and at lesser distances according to the state of the atmosphere; and to a near observer, in favourable circumstances, the light will not wholly disappear between flashes.’ Alan managed to make one hurried trip out to Skerryvore during his annual lighthouse tour. He was delighted with the lens and the completion of the works. ‘We see the light [of Skerryvore] most magnificently from the hill,’ he wrote. ‘It is full of spiculae and is fully more splendid than Inchkeith although 3 times more distant.’ The barracks which had caused Alan so much trouble remained until 1846 but had become so rickety that it was eventually removed. The whole enterprise, from the landing of the first stones to the fitting of the final provisions, had cost £90,268.
In Edinburgh, work continued at its usual pace. Most of Robert’s work for the Convention of Scottish Burghs had been handed over to David, who was now responsible for the furniture of Stevenson work: river-dredging schemes, harbour construction, canal business. David was a thorough, painstaking worker, well-suited to the details of bread-and-butter engineering. Unlike Tom, who was more interested in his own enthusiasms, David stuck to the mainstream path of consultative engineering. He had also become fascinated by controlling and harnessing water forces, but regarded it in more straightforward terms than his younger brother as a test of science over nature. He became expert at gauging the effects of tides on coastal works, methods of diverting shoals or dredging estuaries to allow deeper-hulled boats through to port. More than any of the other Stevensons, David