Stevenson's challenge
Nearly 200 years after it was first built, the Bell Rock Lighthouse still stands - proudly flashing its warning light. Eleven miles out to sea off the east coast of Scotland, it is a remarkable sight - a white stone tower over 30m (100ft) high, rising seemingly without support out of the North Sea.
In fact, it is precariously poised on a treacherous sandstone reef, which, except at low tides, lies submerged just beneath the waves.
'Bell Rock had claimed thousands of lives, as vessels were wrecked on its razor-sharp serrated rocks.'
This incredible feat of engineering has not required a single repair to its stonework since the day it was completed in 1811. But controversy still surrounds the question of whom exactly we should credit for what many regard as the finest lighthouse ever built - and the most outstanding engineering achievement of the 19th century.
Over the centuries, before the lighthouse was built, Bell Rock had claimed thousands of lives, as vessels were wrecked on its razor-sharp serrated rocks. This terror of the seas was given its name after monks from local Arbroath tried to raise a warning bell on its craggy face. But nothing survived on the rock, which posed a fearsome obstacle to all shipping travelling along the east coast and to the Firth of Tay.
To build a permanent beacon that would warn ships to keep away from this rock was both a challenge and an obsession for Robert Stevenson. Brought up in a strong religious household, moral improvement and technological progress to him went hand in hand.
At the age of 30, Stevenson had done well for himself. Raised in poverty, his father died when he was young and he was largely self-taught. He became an engineer for the Northern Lighthouse Board in 1797, inspecting the few warning lights for seafarers that then existed along the Scottish coastline.
In the 1800s these were often no more than coal braziers, and the resulting spoil from wrecked ships was a lucrative business. Most of the coast was in darkness.
Stevenson was convinced he could improve on these primitive lights. It took a year to find anyone brave enough to risk taking him to Bell Rock, but when he finally surveyed the reef in the summer of 1800, he devised a plan for a substantial stone tower.
Published: 2003-08-20
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