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

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Imagine being inside a lighthouse when a storm batters it for days upon days, and an ocean swell taller than the lighthouse itself washes around you. It's an inspiring story that tells us non-Scots about an aspect of the country that we wouldn't likely understand. During his term as chief of the Northern Lighthouse Board, Alan Stevenson built 13 lighthouses in and around Scotland between 1843 and 1853, and over the course of his life designed over 30 in total. This is equally true in the area of lighthouse construction, a story that revolves around three generations of the Stevenson family of Edinburgh. Although quite dry in content, it is full of accounts of storms and their toll on the Scottish coast and even on the crews as they worked to dot the coastline with life saving signals.

Now she has set herself the task of giving the engineer Stevensons their due, and ha done so admirably. There had been lighthouses in England for awhile, but Scotland had other challenges such as atrocious weather, “wreckers” (those who lured ships to claim their possessions), and most felt that shipwrecks were Providence (God’s will). Stevenson was also known for developing city infrastructure, including railway lines, bridges such as Scotland’s Regent Bridge (1814) and monuments such as the Melville Monument in Edinburgh (1821). The author didn't even bother to include drawings or pictures of the Lighthouse Stevensons who are the reason for the book. It's a disturbing thought that people would stand by and watch sailors drown, because interfering might upset God, and they would sometimes even hold sailors under, because obviously God wrecked the ship so wanted them dead.And even when lighthouses were starting to be built around Britain, there was often the excuse that 'if God had wanted a lighthouse there, he would have put one there'.

Read on for the story of the ‘Lighthouse Stevensons’ and their invaluable contribution to lighting up Scotland’s coastlines.The family had a mild tendency to be obsessed by thoughts of a cruel and vindictive God, Alan felt his disease was punishment for making people work on Sundays to complete Skerryvore faster. Alan Stevenson worked on the reflectors and lenses to improve the light output form lighthouses which in place still used candle light, Skerryvore was above the high tide line but remote in the Hebrides and stormy - the first year's work to establish barracks for the 150 craftsmen required to build the lighthouse, fixing - iron bars in to the rock to hold a wooden structure was destroyed by winter storms. The Lighthouse Stevensons, all four generations of them, built every lighthouse round Scotland, were responsible for a slew of inventions in both construction and optics, and achieved feats of engineering in conditions that would be forbidding even today.