Bell Rock lighthouse: Scotland's wonder of the industrial world

We are truly fortunate to live in a beautiful country and for the most part we humans have added well to the beauties of nature. Yes, there are some awful buildings in this country and I will mention those but only in passing, as I mainly want to write about the built heritage that has ameliorated our surroundings.

You cannot tell the history of a nation without knowing about its built heritage, so I aim to explain how that heritage came about and put it in the context of Scottish history as a whole.

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I don’t expect every reader to agree with my choices but there’s a story to be told for every single object I will write about. While some will seem quirky, I would just ask you to read every column and make up your own mind about the facts I present.

You might have expected me to start with a castle but instead I am going for one of the most extraordinary buildings ever raised above Scottish waters, the Bell Rock Lighthouse. It is the oldest sea-washed lighthouse in the world that is still working and is the oldest continuously working lighthouse in Britain. Such was the brilliance of its construction that the original masonry still stands some 223 years on. In 2003 it was selected by the BBC as one of the Seven Wonders of the Industrial World alongside the likes of the Brooklyn Bridge, the Panama Canal and the Hoover Dam.

Its influence on the construction of lighthouses has lasted more than two centuries and therefore it is a real piece of Scotland’s history.

To tell its story I am calling on the assistance of one of Scotland’s greatest writers, Robert Louis Stevenson (RLS, below), who was the grandson of the chief designer and builder of the lighthouse, Robert Stevenson, engineer to the Northern Lighthouse Board for more than 50 years.

RLS was very proud of his family and particularly its trade as builders of lighthouses. He pulled together a book called Record of a Family of Engineers which includes a detailed account of the construction of the Bell Rock Lighthouse. I will be quoting RLS and his grandfather.

The Bell Rock’s real identity is the Inchcape Reef and it had been known as a danger to all forms of shipping for centuries. Sitting about 11 miles off the Angus coast east of the Firth of Tay and consisting of sandstone, the reef is so dangerous because only a small part of it is exposed at low tide while the largest area is iceberg-like underwater, around 12ft deep in 180ft of water.

According to legend, it gained the name Bell Rock after a 13th-century Abbot of Arbroath installed a warning bell on the reef. The story goes that a pirate stole the bell only to be lost when his ship was wrecked on the reef a year later. The legend is immortalised by the poet Robert Southey in The Inchcape Rock.

The total number of ships lost on the Bell Rock is not known but it was certainly in four figures, with more vessels being lost in attempts to avoid it. Trinity House in Leith, which was then in charge of coastal safety for the east of Scotland, recorded an average of six ships being lost on the reef each winter in the 18th century, and by 1794 the organisation was determined to install a warning lighthouse in collaboration with the Edinburgh-based Northern Lighthouse Board.

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The board was influenced by the design and construction of Eddystone Lighthouse in Cornwall, which was built in the 1750s in the form of a stone tower with the lighting apparatus – mirrors reflecting candles – on top. It was a huge innovation at the time. Civil engineer John Smeaton had designed it and that is why he is often known as the father of lighthousing.

His work influenced Robert Stevenson, born in Glasgow but then resident in Edinburgh. The engineer was one of the first people to carry out a proper survey of the reef, recording that “the greatest length, therefore, of the Bell Rock, which may be said to be dangerous to shipping, is about 1427ft, and its greatest breadth is about 300ft.”

In the final years of the 18th century, Stevenson made his plan for the lighthouse and a major impetus for its construction came in January 1804, when a 74-gun ship of the Royal Navy, HMS York, foundered on Bell Rock with the loss of its entire crew. Other vessels were wrecked in that month’s gales and the Northern Lighthouse Board looked to its engineer to solve the problem of how to build the tower that would be needed.

The board appointed noted engineer John Rennie to oversee the project and there are still those who say he should get more credit for his work but it was Stevenson who led the building of the lighthouse in person. He determined that a bigger and more accurate survey was necessary.

RLS wrote: “In 1800, on the occasion of my grandfather’s first landing and during the two or three hours which the ebb-tide and the smooth water allowed them to pass upon its shelves, his crew collected upwards of two hundredweight of old metal: pieces of a kedge anchor and a cabin stove, crowbars, a hinge and lock of a door, a ship’s marking-iron, a piece of a ship’s caboose, a soldier’s bayonet, a cannon ball, several pieces of money, a shoe-buckle, and the like. Such were the spoils of the Bell Rock.”

Robert Stevenson soon came up with a plan to build the lighthouse, and the board applied to Parliament to approve its construction as the money to pay for it would need to be raised through a levy charged on the east coast.

It passed the House of Commons in 1802 but the Lords threw it out the following year. The board came up with a better plan and it passed both Houses in 1806.

The following year a captured Prussian fishing vessel was turned into a lightship called Pharos and was moored to shed its light on the Rock. Robert Stevenson decided they would start construction in the summer, with the Pharos being used as a floating lightship with lanterns.

RLS quotes his grandfather on that historic first day: “A sloop of 40 tons had been in the meantime built at Leith, and named the Smeaton. By August 7 my grandfather set sail in her carrying with him Mr Peter Logan, foreman builder, and five artificers selected from their having been somewhat accustomed to the sea, being aware of the distressing trial which the floating light would necessarily inflict upon landsmen from her rolling motion.

“Here he remained till the 10th, and, as the weather was favourable, a landing was effected daily, when the workmen were employed in cutting the large seaweed from the sites of the lighthouse and beacon, which were respectively traced with pickaxes upon the rock.”

Progress was of necessity slow but sure and, having personally selected the blocks of granite which would form the base and the tower, Stevenson oversaw their placement on the Bell Rock. He was always the last to leave.

Gradually, the shape of the tower began to emerge and despite the difficulties of working far out to sea, the lighthouse was completed in just three years. The tools of the building trade were adapted for work on the Rock and there was even a forge on the Smeaton. However, there were numerous accidents and in 1808, the only fatality occurred when 18-year-old James Scott was swept away and drowned.

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Robert Stevenson recorded: “The young man Scott was a great favourite in the service, having had something uncommonly mild and complaisant in his manner; and his loss was therefore universally regretted.

“The circumstances of his case were also peculiarly distressing to his mother, as her husband, who was a seaman, had for three years past been confined to a French prison, and the deceased was the chief support of the family.”

James Scott’s brother took his place among the crew and Stevenson persuaded the Board to grant his mother an annuity of £5.

Towards the end of the construction period, Stevenson selected the first set of four lightkeepers, led by John Reid and Peter Fortune. It would be their job to undergo a trial period in the lighthouse and Stevenson duly reported on this.

He wrote: “Mr Reid stated that during the late gales … both he and Mr Fortune sensibly felt the house tremble when particular seas struck, about the time of high-water, the former observing that it was a tremor of that sort which rather tended to convince him that everything about the building was sound and reminded him of the effect produced when a good log of timber is struck sharply with a mallet, but with every confidence in the stability of the building, He nevertheless confessed that, in so forlorn a situation, they were not insensible to those emotions which, he emphatically observed, ‘made a man look back upon his former life’.”

It took nearly three months to build the actual lighting apparatus on top of the tower but all was ready by February 1, 1811, with the whole edifice weighing around 1400 tons and being 115ft tall.

Robert Stevenson wrote: “The day, long wished for, on which the mariner was to see a light exhibited on the Bell Rock at length arrived. Captain Wilson, as usual, hoisted the float’s lanterns to the topmast on the evening of February 1 but the moment the light appeared on the rock, the crew, giving three cheers, lowered them and finally extinguished the lights.”

From the beginning, the lighthouse was a success and the number of shipwrecks locally fell to zero. People came from far and wide to sail out to the Bell Rock, and its fame spread across Britain and Europe. Engineers and architects came to study it and the design of the lighthouse and its method of construction were copied globally. It really is a building that Scotland can be proud of.

There is a remarkable cultural postscript to the story of the building of the lighthouse. No less a personage than Walter Scott, then one of the commissioners of the Northern Lighthouse Board, inspected the Bell Rock in 1814, and wrote a short poem in the visitors’ album. It reads:

Far in the bosom of the deep

O’er these wild shelves my watch I keep

A ruddy gem of changeful light

Bound on the dusky brow of Night

The Seaman bids my lustre hail

And scorns to strike his tim’rous sail

Such was the growing fame of the lighthouse that the English painter JMW Turner accepted a commission from Robert Stevenson to paint it in 1819. The watercolour and gouache painting of the lighthouse in the midst of a storm is now in the National Gallery of Scotland, having been passed on through the Stevenson family until the gallery purchased it in 1989.

Having survived both world wars – German aircraft attacked it during the Second World War but did little damage – the Bell Rock Lighthouse is now fully automated and continues to send its light out into the North Sea.