Northern Lighthouse Board

The First Four Lights

The Commissioners hired Thomas Smith, an Edinburgh lamp-maker whose oil lamps with polished reflectors were a real advance on open coal fires. Their first light was Kinnaird Head at Fraserburgh, lit on 1 December 1787, ingeniously fitted into the top of an existing sixteenth-century castle — a decision that saved money and left the Board with its least typical building. North Ronaldsay in Orkney, Eilean Glas on Scalpay and the Mull of Kintyre followed by 1790.

Smith’s more lasting contribution may have been domestic: his stepson and later son-in-law, Robert Stevenson, joined the work and succeeded him as engineer in 1797, beginning a family connection that lasted until 1938.

Bell Rock, and Who Built It

The Inchcape or Bell Rock lies about eleven miles off Arbroath and is covered by the sea at every high tide. It had wrecked ships for centuries; storm losses around 1799 made a light on it politically urgent. Parliamentary authority came in 1806, construction ran from 1807 to 1810, and the light was first shown on 1 February 1811.

The engineering was brutal. Masons worked in short windows between tides, at first ferried from a tender and later housed in a timber barrack raised on beams above the water, cutting and dovetailing granite blocks so that each course locked into the one below and into the rock itself. Storms cut the site off for days at a time. The tower is still standing on that original masonry, which is why the correct claim is the oldest surviving sea-washed lighthouse in the world — not the first offshore light, which Eddystone had been since 1698, and not the first stone rock tower, which was Smeaton’s Eddystone of 1759.

The authorship question deserves a straight answer. The Commissioners formally appointed John Rennie as chief engineer; Robert Stevenson was resident engineer, designed the working methods and the barrack, and ran the site through four seasons. Rennie advised on masonry principles drawn from Smeaton and corresponded throughout. Stevenson’s own Account of the Bell Rock Lighthouse (1824) said little of Rennie’s part, Rennie’s son objected publicly, and historians have argued the balance ever since. Scottish accounts tend to credit Stevenson alone; that overstates the documentary record.

The Stevenson Dynasty

No other engineering family in Britain held one public post for so long. Robert served from 1797 to 1843 and built or improved around eighteen lighthouses besides Bell Rock. His son Alan succeeded him and built Skerryvore (completed 1844), a wave-swept tower on a reef off Tiree that is frequently judged the most graceful masonry lighthouse in Britain. David and Thomas served as joint engineers from 1854, and David Alan Stevenson from 1885 until his retirement in 1938.

Thomas Stevenson’s son, Robert Louis Stevenson, trained as an engineer and visited the rock stations before abandoning the profession for literature — leaving some of the best descriptive writing about the family trade. The dynasty is a genuine achievement, but the Board’s lighthouses were not built by five men: Thomas Smith came first, contractors and masons did the work, and Board engineers carried it on after 1938.

Optics, Rock and Weather

Building the tower was only half the problem; being seen was the other. From Smith’s reflector lamps onward the Board invested in optical improvement, culminating in Stevenson work on the holophotal principle — arranging lenses and mirrors so that almost all the light from a source is directed towards the horizon rather than wasted. Distinctive flash characters allowed mariners to identify individual stations; fog signals covered the days when no light would carry.

The family’s scientific work reached beyond lighthouses. Thomas Stevenson devised instruments for measuring the force of waves against masonry — a practical necessity when designing rock towers — and the louvred meteorological screen still known by the Stevenson name, which became a global standard for housing thermometers.

Governance and Funding

The Board is a statutory body, not a charity or a company. Its commissioners have included law officers, sheriffs principal and civic representatives since 1786, with the composition modernised by later legislation. Funding comes from light dues paid by commercial shipping into the General Lighthouse Fund, shared with Trinity House for England and Wales and the Commissioners of Irish Lights for Ireland. The three authorities cooperate on standards and technology but remain distinct, which is why Scottish lighthouse history should not be told as a UK-wide story.

Automation and the Modern Board

Electrification, automatic lamp changers and telemetry made permanent keepers unnecessary. Station by station through the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, the crews were withdrawn, until Fair Isle South was automated on 31 March 1998 — the last manned lighthouse in Scotland. Today the Board maintains around two hundred lighthouses along with buoys and beacons, monitored remotely from Edinburgh and increasingly supplemented by satellite navigation. Lights remain a legal requirement and a practical backup: satellites fail, and rocks do not move.

Several redundant stations have become museums, holiday accommodation or wildlife stations. Kinnaird Head, the first of them all, now houses the Museum of Scottish Lighthouses — the Board’s history preserved in the building where it began.

The Keepers, and What the Job Cost

The Board’s towers were only as reliable as the men who lived in them. A rock station such as Bell Rock, Skerryvore or Dubh Artach was a sealed world: three or four keepers on a tour of duty measured in weeks, sleeping in curved rooms stacked above one another, hauling stores up by derrick, and waiting for a relief boat that bad weather could delay for days beyond its date. Shore stations were gentler — keepers’ cottages, families, a garden, a school run for lighthouse children — but the discipline was the same: the light was lit at a prescribed time, trimmed and watched through the night, and logged.

The Board ran the service on quasi-naval lines. Keepers wore uniform, moved between stations on posting rather than by choice, kept station journals, and were inspected without much notice by the Commissioners on their annual voyage — a tradition that gave Scottish literature some of its best travel writing, since guests occasionally came along. Cleanliness of the lens and glass was as much a matter of duty as the light itself: a soot-filmed reflector could halve a station’s useful range.

The costs were real. Men were lost during construction and relief operations, families were separated for months, and the isolation of the rock stations produced its own well-documented strain. The most famous episode in the Board’s history is a disappearance rather than a triumph: in December 1900 the three keepers of the Flannan Isles light vanished, leaving a tended lamp, an unfinished meal in some retellings, and storm damage at the west landing. The official investigation concluded that the men were most likely swept away while securing gear in heavy seas. Almost everything else attached to the story — stopped clocks, overturned chairs, the lurid supernatural detail — belongs to later fiction and verse, above all Wilfrid Wilson Gibson’s 1912 poem, and should not be presented as record.

That is worth stating plainly, because the Flannan Isles is where lighthouse history most often slips into legend. The verifiable facts are grim and ordinary: three men doing a dangerous job on an Atlantic rock in December, and a Board left to relight the station and carry on. When automation arrived seventy years later it removed a way of life that had been genuinely admired, and also one that had asked a great deal of the people who lived it.

Timeline

1. 1786

   The Northern Lighthouses Act

   Commissioners appointed after lobbying by George Dempster; four lights ordered

2. 1 Dec 1787

   Kinnaird Head lit

   Built into an existing 16th-century castle at Fraserburgh

3. 1788–90

   North Ronaldsay, Eilean Glas and Mull of Kintyre lit

   The original four stations complete

4. 1797

   Robert Stevenson becomes engineer

   Succeeding his stepfather Thomas Smith

5. 1799

   The Bell Rock disaster year

   Storm losses intensify pressure for a light on the reef

6. 1806

   Parliamentary authority for Bell Rock

   After years of dispute over cost and feasibility

7. 1807–10

   Bell Rock built

   John Rennie appointed chief engineer; Stevenson resident engineer and site builder

8. 1 Feb 1811

   Bell Rock first lit

   Still standing on its original masonry

9. 1811–43

   Robert Stevenson's main tenure

   Around 18 further lighthouses, harbour and road work

10. 1843

    Alan Stevenson succeeds his father

    Skerryvore, completed 1844, is his masterpiece

11. 1854

    David and Thomas Stevenson as joint engineers

    Optical research and the holophotal system follow

12. 1885

    David Alan Stevenson joins

    The fourth generation; serves until 1938

13. 1894

    Muckle Flugga and the far north complete

    Britain's most northerly light, first lit 1854 as a temporary tower

14. 1898

    Rattray Head and later rock stations

    Continued expansion around the deadliest capes

15. 1938

    The Stevenson connection ends

    David Alan Stevenson retires as engineer

16. 1970s–90s

    Automation programme

    Keepers withdrawn station by station

17. 31 Mar 1998

    Fair Isle South automated

    The last manned lighthouse in Scotland

18. Today

    Remote monitoring from Edinburgh

    Around 200 lighthouses, funded by light dues

Did You Know?

• The Board's first lighthouse was built inside a 16th-century castle at Fraserburgh.
• Its first commissioners were law officers, sheriffs and burgh provosts — no engineers among them.
• Bell Rock's masons lived on a timber barrack raised on beams above the open sea.
• The Bell Rock tower still stands on its original 1807–10 masonry.
• John Rennie, not Robert Stevenson, was the formally appointed chief engineer at Bell Rock.
• Four generations of Stevensons served the Board continuously from 1797 to 1938.
• Robert Louis Stevenson trained as a lighthouse engineer before becoming a novelist.
• The Stevenson meteorological screen, still used worldwide, came out of lighthouse science.
• Scotland's last lighthouse keepers left Fair Isle South on 31 March 1998.
• Shipping, not general taxation, pays for the lights through the General Lighthouse Fund.

Honest Caveats

Bell Rock was not the first offshore lighthouse. Eddystone holds that ground, and Smeaton’s 1759 tower supplied the method. Bell Rock’s distinction is that it survived.

Do not give Bell Rock to one man. Rennie was chief engineer, Stevenson resident engineer and builder; the dispute over credit began in Stevenson’s own lifetime and remains live.

The Stevensons did not do it all. Thomas Smith was the Board’s first engineer, and contractors, masons and later Board staff built and maintained the network.

Family attributions get mixed up. Medals, papers and individual towers are routinely assigned to the wrong Stevenson; check the station and the date.

Counts are definitional. Whether the Board has “200 lighthouses” depends on whether minor lights, buoys and beacons are included; use the Board’s own current published figures.

Wreck and casualty statistics before the nineteenth century are unreliable, so claims about how many lives the lights saved should be treated as indicative rather than measured.