The lure of the lighthouse

WHAT IS IT about lighthouses? The Princess Royal has this week confessed to being fascinated by them since childhood, and still enjoys “bagging” them, either from vessels of the Northern Lighthouse Board, of which she is patron, or sailing with her husband, Vice-Admiral Tim Laurence. But ten years after the last Scottish lighthouse keeper locked the door behind him, lighthouses still cast a unique spell, even on landlubbers like me.

From the foot of my suburban street I can watch them blinking along the Firth of Forth littoral as darkness gathers, but I’ve been lucky enough to visit some outlying ones, flying out to Hyskeir, eight miles west of Rum, on a NLB maintenance helicopter, to interview the penultimate shift of keepers before the light’s automation in early 1997. Even more memorable, a few years later, was taking another little red chopper ride out to that most fabled of lights, Flannan Isles, where in December 1900 the Marie Celeste-like disappearance of its three keepers inspired a poem by Wilfrid Wilson Gibson. This piece was dinned into us at school, instilling not necessarily an appreciation of poetry, but a whole gallimaufry of conspiracy theories – the accepted explanation that the men were almost certainly taken by a big wave being far too pedestrian for our fevered imaginations.

Bella Bathurst, whose widely acclaimed book The Lighthouse Stevensons charts the history of the formidable Scottish dynasty of lighthouse-builders (plus, of course, one author, a certain Robert Louis) agrees and tells me that lighthouses are simply “very compelling. It’s partly because they’re often in such fantastic places, and also that they are such extraordinary pieces of architecture, designed to withstand extraordinary forces … also because most of the major lights in Scotland are 200 years old or so. There is something incredibly powerful about seeing that light working on a dark night.”

Roger Lockwood, chief executive of the Northern Lighthouse Board, agrees that despite de-manning (the last manned Scottish lighthouse, Fair Isle South, went automatic in 1998), not only do lighthouses continue to fascinate the public but, if the number of hits on the NLB website is any indication, interest is growing. “Despite the absence of resident keepers,” he says, “our lighthouses continue to fulfil their very important role, providing, along with the other marine aids to navigation, the warning signals and directional guidance so important to the mariner using our waters.

“What is so attractive to the public? Well, by their very nature, each lighthouse stands in some of the most wonderful and inspiring landscapes, and each one differs in some way from the other, from the iconic Bell Rock lighthouse, the oldest-surviving pillar rock lighthouse, to a modern, solar-powered light.”

Even in an age of automation, radar and satellite global positioning systems, lighthouses maintain a timeless, almost elemental appeal, their distant glimmer offering a certain reassurance at what can seem like the edge of the world. Helicopter-borne to Hyskeir, for instance, you chatter up the Sound of Mull and leave the headlands of Morvern and Ardnamurchan far behind until, eventually, you discern the seemingly limitless sea breaking around what resembles a broken slate with a little white peg rising from it. This is the lighthouse.

The Flannan Isles, also known as the Seven Hunters, are even more outcast, some 20 miles north-west of Gallan Head on Lewis and their reputation forever enshrined in the realms of the supernatural by Gibson’s poem. When I visited it, although automated, the lighthouse’s lonely ambience was somewhat dispelled by the presence of a couple of cheerful maintenance painters. Outside and away from the gabbling of Richard and Judy on their TV, however, the isle’s rocky inlets, landing railings twisted grotesquely by the battering of the sea, cliffs ringing with the perpetual shriek of seabirds, were places where you could imagine just about anything.

Otherworldly, too, is the Bass Rock, where, since the vacating of its lighthouse, its gannet population – the largest “single-rock” colony of northern gannets in the world – now threatens to cover the volcanic crag completely. As you follow the old concrete path across the rock, thousands of the densely nesting birds follow you with their faintly unnerving, bespectacled stare. Also in the Firth of Forth, another bird sanctuary, the Isle of May, was the site of Scotland’s first permanently manned lighthouse, a coal-burning beacon erected there in 1635 in response to the surrounding waters’ toll on unwary shipping, although the present lighthouse was built by Robert Stevenson in 1816.

For Bathurst, these structures are more than marvels of engineering, they are icons of admirable altruism: “The Stevensons stuck more or less to Robert Stevenson’s original principle, which was never to take out a patent on any of their lighthouse inventions, because he felt they were for the good of humanity as a whole. So I think they stand as wonderful statements of humanitarianism, the best that we’re capable of.”

Since automation, every so often a lighthouse comes up for sale as a spectacular, if idiosyncratic, des res: just this week, for example, Killantringan in Wigtonshire, a David Stevenson light built in 1900, went on the market for offers over 650,000. It offers superb views across the Irish sea, although Bathurst suggests that prospective buyers should think hard.

“People ring me up every time one comes on the market,” she says, “but they forget that these are basically houses of the four winds. They’re built with railings round them – literally to stop people from blowing away.”

At least Killantringan is on the mainland. I remember speaking to two of the last keepers on Hyskeir about life on what they called “pillar rocks”, those lights which rear straight from isolated rock outcrops, far out at sea. “It’s when you’re three or four flights up and the sea starts chapping at your window,” as one put it, while another recalled the four and half years he spent doing shifts on Bell Rock, 118ft (36 metres) of sandstone pillar 11 miles off the Angus coast, built by Robert Stevenson, immortalised by Turner.

“In a north-easterly wind,” he recalled wryly, “God, she used to jump.”

For further information, see www.nlb.org.uk