Fife and Scotland - the offbeat perspective

According to British author, Deborah Cadbury, who wrote the 'Seven Wonders of the Industrial World', the Bell Rock Lighthouse is one of the finest examples of modern engineering and remains as the World's oldest surviving sea-washed lighthouse. The BBC agreed and made a televised programme about it.

Indeed, the interlocking components of the lighthouse were constructed to such high standard that none have needed replacement or adaptation in over two centuries. Standing at thirty-five metres high, the light is visible from thirty-five miles in good weather. It was designed by Robert Stevenson (a relative of author Robert Louis Stevenson) and built despite great hardship between 1807 and 1810 with the lamp first lit on 1st February 1811.

Despite being the longest enduring lighthouse in Scotland, it was not the first. A beacon was established on the May Isle as early as 1635CE and paid for by a levy on local shipping. It took three men and four hundred tons of coal to maintain it each year. In 1791, one of the three keepers, his wife and children were suffocated by fumes caused by partial ignition of accumulated ash.

Robert Stevenson was called upon a new lighthouse for the May Isle and it was built and completed in 1816 an following purchase of the island in 1814 for £60,000 by the Northern Lighthouse Board. The May Isle Beacon was thus the last independently owned structure of it's type.

The new lighthouse remains an ornate gothic style castellated stone building designed to resemble a castle. It's twenty-four metres high with accomodation space for three light keepers and their families. The new lighthouse began operation on 1st September 1816 and was upgraded twenty years later with new light and reflectors. More investment followed in 1886 with additional dwellings, boiler, engine, workshop and coal store were built; the latter located 250 metres in a small valley containing fresh water.

The engine house was fitted with two steam-powered generators, and at 4.5 tons each, the largest ever constructed at that time. They had a total output of 8.8 kilowatts. These powered an arc lamp in the lighthouse, with a three-wick paraffin lamp back-up kept lit but turned down in case the electric lamp failed. The new light was first used on 1 December 1886 and produced four flashes every 30 seconds. (Pic on right by Jeremy Atherton).

The high cost of the coal, around 150 tons per year, along with improvements in oil lights led to the replacement with the brighter incandescent mantle technology in 1924.

Another smaller lighthouse, known as the 'Low Light' was constructed a few hundred yards from the main light in 1843 to provide (with the main lighthouse) a pair of lights which would become aligned to help ships avoid the North Carr reefs located eleven kilometres to the north of the island. It was first used in April 1844 but subsequently made redundant by the establishment of the North Carr Lightship in 1887.

North Carr became the last Scottish lightship and withdrawn from service in 1975 and served for a tme as tourist attraction in Anstruther harbour and in conjuction with the Scottish Fisheries Museum also based in Anstruther.It has since been been moved to Dundee. With better comunications and systems, the 'Low Light' now serves as 'bird observatory' and where the island serves as part of one of the largest protected bird communities in Scotland.

The May Isle Lighthouse ceased to accomodate the keeper's wives from August 1972 (they lived on the mainland) and the lighthouse became fully automated in March 1989 and linked by a UHF radio system to Fife Ness Lighthouse and where data was then communicated via landlines to the Northern Lighthouse Board headquarters in Edinburgh. The Fife Ness coastguard station was closed down in 2011 due to government economic stringency.

The Museum of Scottish Lighthouses

The Kinaird Lighthouse in Fraserburgh sits on a promontory in the village of Fraserburgh. Designed by Thomas Smith and built in 1787, Kinaird Head Lighthouse is one of the oldest in Scotland. It was also the first lighthouse fitted with a radio beacon in 1929. Today, the lighthouse forms part of the Museum of Scottish Lighthouses and where the neighbouring and more modern building houses many displays related to lighthouses and has a small cafe with a nice view over the sea.

Although this is a small museum, the displays of lighthouse lamps and mirrors is impressive. The lens on the right, for instance, is actually standing on the ground floor and the part shown rises through an aperture in the second floor!

The photograph above shows a wartime contact mine and which, like many others, were converted into large 'piggy banks' and where members of the public were encouraged to deposit 'spare change' in support of the Fisherman's Mutual Society or else the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. There used to be one of these at St Monans (then called St Monance) harbour in Fife about forty years ago but we have no information about what happened to it. This one was located at the entrance to the Scottish Lighthouse Museum in Fraserburgh. It remains as the last that I have seen in current use during my lifetime.