The Lighthouse Stevensons: The Extraordinary Story of the Building of the Scottish Lighthouses by the Ancestors of Robert Louis Stevenson

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For instance, we learn that the ground rocks for the Skerryvore lighthouse were prepared by hand (even though the "gneiss could blunt a pick in three blows") in waves and winds "strong enough to lift a man bodily off the rock" and that "it took 120 hours to dress a single stone for the outside of the tower and 320 hours to dress one of the central stones. It is amazing that the lighthouses were so well constructed and that they last to this day even as automated lights. There's a lot of that, and a lot of narrative of how the Stevenson family, generation by generation, wrote the book on engineering not just the lighthouses but the long-range lights that were the main event once the towers were in place. In 1786 the Northern Lighthouse Trust (NLT) was established and Robert Stevenson was the chief engineer.

Other than that, it is a well-written story of a family, obsessed with the building of lighthouses, especially Scottish ones.The first formal mention of Robert Stevenson in connection with the Northern Lighthouse Board was when his step-father entrusted him with the Superintendence of the building of Pentland Skerries Lighthouse in 1794. Of the hundred thousand or so people employed on the sea in the 1750s, between 30% to 40% would not have survived to see old age. The name "Robert Louis Stevenson" probably rings a bell for most of us - he did author a few famous literary classics like "Treasure Island" and "The Strange Case of Dr. Robert Stevenson, the patriarch, demanded much from his family, in their education and life in general.

His contribution to engineering is deemed to be so significant that he was inducted into the Scottish Engineering Hall of Fame in 2016. The Lighthouse Stevensons (1999), Bella Bathurst’s biography of the family, is a potted account of their triumphs, an often dramatic account that plaits the families’ lives, the development of engineering, and the maturing of what is now the Northern Lighthouse Board (NLB), responsible for the lighthouses’ upkeep, into an engaging and informative story. Any account of so many achievements would likely run to many volumes and, no doubt, be a dry affair.

Whenever I smell salt water, I know that I am not far from one of the works of my ancestors,’ wrote Robert Louis Stevenson in 1880. I had never realized that whole villages relied on wrecks for their living, so they would be against building lighthouses. And even some sailors didn't want them - they were accustomed to short, dangerous lives, and trying to make sailing safer seemed like messing with God's plans.