The Big Read: Do we really still need lighthouses? Ask Scotland’s light brigade

Addison also sees what lighthouses have to put up with. One of his first assignments was on Muckle Flugga, the uninhabited island north of Unst in the Shetlands. He was on the rock for two weeks doing maintenance work with colleagues and was assigned one of the two bedrooms in the tower itself. 

Some days it was fine – calm, sunny – but one night the sea crashed so hard against the rocks that the vibration shook the lighthouse and moved his bed three or four inches from the wall. It was a reminder of the power of the sea but also the ingenuity and perseverance of the men who built the tower in the first place.

Addison says he would recommend the job to anyone. “I was working part-time in a butcher’s before this,” he says, “but I decided I wanted to start an apprenticeship and the lighthouse one stood out – the job sounded amazing. I knew that was where I wanted to work. I get to travel about Scotland and I get to go to places that people pay to go to. It’s an adventure.”

The young apprentice is also part of a network of people who still maintain and care for Scotland’s lighthouses, including retained keepers who regularly check on the lighthouses and do any maintenance job that’s required. Like Addison, the keepers say that people are sometimes surprised there are still staff looking after lighthouses. “Aren’t they all automated?” they say. Well, yes, say the keepers, but lighthouses can’t run themselves, can they?

That doesn’t mean that the future of lighthouses is entirely secure or stable. The 200-year-old Orfordness Lighthouse on the Suffolk coast was taken down by a demolition crew this month because the sea is eroding the shingle beach it stands on. In the last 30 to 40 years, there have also been dramatic changes in the way lighthouses are manned and run. Automation was completed in the 1990s which meant full-time keepers were no longer required and the changes are still happening: the current technology that runs the lights is gradually being replaced and modernised. The lights still shine, but everything is different.

In a way, Davie Ferguson, who is one of the NLB’s retained keepers, represents every stage in that development: past, present and future. In the days when he was a fisherman, he knew how important the lighthouses were. “They were hugely reassuring,” he says. 

“You were navigating by radar but the light would bring you home.” He also remembers the days when his local lighthouse, Ardnamurchan on the west coast, was fully manned. The keepers and their families were a big part of the community, he says, but the last of them left in the 1980s.

Now Ferguson is a keeper himself, albeit in a different way. As a retained keeper, he looks after three sites: Rubha nan Gall, north of Tobermory; Corran Point in Ardgour; and Ardnamurchan. That generally means checking on the lighthouses once a month and carrying out any maintenance that needs doing.

He says the retained keepers aren’t entirely what you’d expect. “We’re not all salty old sea dogs,” he says. “There are retired people, but there are young people too and some of them have no maritime background – they’re just interested in lighthouses. It’s nice to have some youngsters.”

Then there’s the future of lighthouses to worry about and Ferguson is part of that too. In recent days it was confirmed that the complex of buildings at Ardnamurchan lighthouse has been sold to the local community – and Ferguson is the manager of the trust that will run the project. The plan is to develop it: the principal keeper’s house will be a visitors’ centre while the two other houses will be rented out to anyone who wants to come and stay.

For Ferguson, one of the motivations for the project was the sense of history – and preserving it for the future – but the history has not always been comfortable or kind. Apprentice James Addison says one of the things that struck him when he was at Muckle Flugga was the sheer effort of building something on such a difficult site and in such treacherous conditions – the same thing strikes you when you go out by boat to visit the Bell Rock lighthouse off the east coast.

The only thing that’s there, 11 miles out to sea, is a treacherous reef that is fully exposed only at the lowest spring tides. Yet 200 years ago, the great lighthouse engineer Robert Stevenson drew up plans to build one there and then did it.

The challenge didn’t end there though because living and working in the lighthouses could also be extremely tough. Dundonian John Boath was the last principal keeper at the Bell Rock and, like James Addison and Davie Ferguson, he would sometimes marvel at the sheer ingenuity of the place. He said that when he was working at the Bell, he would sometimes walk about on the rocks at low tide just visualising the work that went into building it.

But he also explained just how hard the job was. There were no steps up to the door – instead, the keepers had to be winched across from a boat – while inside there were no baths or showers and water had to be rationed. The rooms were tiny, too – about 12ft long at most – and the rota was gruelling: four weeks on and four weeks off.

“It was tough,” said Boath, “and the Bell was responsible for a lot of men resigning, but in those days it was your job and you got on with it. There was no use mumping about it. I would say to my wife, ‘Don’t phone with any problems – you’ll have to deal with them yourself’.”

In the end, Boath took early retirement in the 1990s as the automation process neared its end, and he was the last man off the Bell. “I felt sad when I switched off that light for the last time,” he says.

He also believes the process was not handled particularly well. “There were lighthouse keepers who had done 40 or 50 years and went off the station without so much as a thank you. The lighthouse service was a Victorian institution. The keepers had a little wall round them and they were secure but some of them, when they left, were homeless. We struggled.”

What it means is that the Northern Lighthouse Board is a much smaller and leaner organisation than it was once was, but the people working for it now, as well as the people who just love lighthouses, are confident about their future. 

First of all – as Addison discovered when the waves did their worst on Muckle Flugga – they were built to last. The Bell, for example, is built from 1,000 tons of granite and has withstood the salt and the water and the wind for more than 200 years – and there’s no reason to think it won’t survive for another 200.

But just as the lighthouses stay the same, they also change, and that’s another key to their long-term survival. “The NLB have moved with the times – they are at the cutting edge,” says Davie Ferguson. “As shipping changes, the lighthouses have been able to adapt. Folk say ‘och, you don’t need lighthouses’ but we do – as anybody that’s at sea knows. You’re in a wheelhouse and the rain is lashing and you’re looking at a computer screen and then you look out and see the two flashes and you know that’s Ardnamurchan and you know exactly where you are.”

Mike Bullock, the chief executive of the Northern Lighthouse Board, says something similar. “Maintaining and preserving these wonderful structures, many of which are over 200 years old, is an ongoing mission,” he says. “We have a dedicated team of project engineers, technicians, locally employed retained lighthouse keepers, seafarers and support staff who all play a vital role in ensuring that our aids to navigation meet the evolving requirements of the mariner, whether they be in a super tanker, creel boat or yacht.

“Despite advances in navigational technology, lighthouses and other physical aids to navigation such as buoys are still absolutely essential in ensuring mariners are able to safely negotiate our rocky and dangerous coastline and they continue to be a vital part of the mix of maritime aids to navigation. Taking away that visual reference point would be like taking the kerb stones and road signs away from drivers.”

That’s the way everyone involved with lighthouses feels, but even if the lights were switched off one day, it’s likely that the passion many people feel for lighthouses would ensure their survival in some form. Ferguson says there’s a real mix of people who visit the Ardnamurchan area, but that many of the visitors are drawn by the lighthouse. 

“There are some very dedicated lighthouse enthusiasts who come here,” he says. “They’re almost like Munro-baggers, they want to visit every lighthouse and chief among them is Princess Anne.”

What draws them? What is it about lighthouses that exerts such a pull? Like many others in the service, for Barry Miller, the retained keeper at Corsewall lighthouse, north of Stranraer, it’s about the might of the engineering, but it’s also about something less tangible too: the power of light. “The light has not been off since 1816 – not a single night, even during the war,” he says, “and there’s a comforting quality to that.”

For Miller, there’s also the extra privilege of getting close to the light. Standing in the Corsewell lamp room, Miller describes what it is like on a harsh night. “It’s beautiful up here when it’s stormy,” he said. “You can feel the buffeting and the noise, and you can see these fingers of light turning down below your head. These five fingers, rotating.”
He talked about the people who had gone before him in the service, but he talked, too, about the future and how important retained keepers will continue to be.

Recently, the NLB has joined other maritime employers in promising to keep on apprentices like James Addison through the uncertainty of the coronavirus pandemic. And if anyone does still wonder whether we really do need lighthouses, there is that important question, the one that Addison asks, over the sound of the sea: would you drive your car at night without lights because you’ve got satnav?