“Skerryvore” — the name was synonymous with terror for generations of mariners who had to navigate the waters of the North Irish Channel off the west coast of Scotland. In their superstitious, seafaring minds, the infamous reef, which stretched for 7 miles, was a monstrous submarine serpent whose giant scales ripped open the hulls of ships and whose crews were sucked down to a dark, cold watery tomb.

“Very many vessels were wrecked on this dangerous reef whose names could never be learned and of which nothing but portions of the drift wood or cargo came ashore; and there have, no doubt, been many shipwrecks of which not a single trace has been left. Nothing, indeed, is more probable than that many of the foreign vessels whose course lay through the North Irish Channel, and whose fate has been briefly and vaguely described as ‘foundered at sea,’ have met their fate on the ‘infamous scopuli of the Skerryvore.'”

Such was the report to the Northern Lighthouse Board in 1834, stressing the need for a lighthouse on behalf of the naval and commercial branches of empire. “This reef forms a very great Bar to the Navigation of the outer passage of the Highlands, a Track which is used chiefly by his Majesty’s Vessels of War and First-Class Merchantmen! It is also an obstacle of no small magnitude to the foreign trade of the Clyde and the Mersey.” It came time to put up a lighthouse, and it fell to Alan Stevenson to do it.

Alan Stevenson, third chief engineer for the NLB, was brilliant. He loved engineering but had other interests, too. He was a classical scholar and a linguist who preferred to read the great books without translation. He dabbled in music and poetry, and for a close friend he had the poet William Wordsworth. The lighthouse Alan set himself to build at Skerryvore would be his masterpiece, his stone poem.

If you were the chief engineer of the NLB, like Alan was, and assigned to build the Skerryvore lighthouse, you would have to do a lot more than just design the thing. You would have to risk your life to find the best place to put it. Then you would search the countryside to find the nearest suitable source of stone and then do the NLB’s legal work to get at it. Then you would assemble a team of quarriers and train them how to do it. Then you would have to attract a larger force of men and equipment to haul 5,000 tons of granite 26 miles to water. Then you would find still more men to offload it all into a special boat designed by you to transport the stone and everything else needed for the job a mere 70 miles to a drab, cheerless island called Tiree, a place inhabited by fisher-folk and wreckers, fairly well inbred and hostile to your intentions.

Tiree would be the field HQ of your project. That meant you would have to plan and oversee the construction of a small village of stone houses with windows and chimneys to house another workforce, the actual builders of the lighthouse-to-be. They would look at you for their provisions and pay. Then you would have to see to a seaside factory with workshops for carpentry, metal-working and stone-cutting. But before you could start all that, you would have to plan and build a harbor. Then, when everything was finally in place, you would be able to start building your lighthouse on a nearly submerged rock 11 more miles out to sea.

Somehow during that logistical nightmare, you would have to make time for the science of it all, like the improvement or invention of new lights and optics while facing the elements to learn that the force of the waves pounding the proposed work area could exert up to two tons per square foot on the exposed rock. And the location! The historic little island of Iona, where St. Columba started his Scottish Christian movement in 563 A.D., is not far at all from Scotland’s west coast. If you hike over to the seaward shore and stare due west out to sea — well, you won’t see it in daytime. But you will see the light at night, 37 miles out there, the loneliest and many say the most beautiful lighthouse in the world — Skerryvore, “the finest combination of mass with elegance to be met with in architecture or engineering structures” according to the Scottish Institute of Civil Engineers.

Six years of preparation it took before Alan Stevenson could begin actual construction of his tower, on July 2, 1840. He made an entry in his journal: “They laid the first stone out with no ceremony but three cheers and a glass.” The last stone went into place on July 25, 1842. But it would take two more years to get Skerryvore operating. The lens for the light to shine out to sea from inside the lantern, on top of the tower that Alan built, was being fashioned in France with specifications so exact and complicated that it forced delay. Alan would move on to his next project and leave the finishing touches at Skerryvore, like installing and lighting the light, to his younger brother, Thomas, the father to be of Robert Louis Stevenson.

Having thus christened his new home Skerryvore in Bournemouth, England, RLS placed a lighthouse-like lantern at the street entrance that was religiously lit every evening, just like a real one, and in the garden was a ship’s bell.

Worse-than-usual bad health for Stevenson would persist at Skerryvore, but when he could, he wrote and made new friends. The Stevenson expedition holed up there for about 27 months before resuming their travels. Skerryvore, the lighthouse, is still serving its purpose 176 years after Thomas turned it on. Skerryvore, the house, is gone. If you go there, all you will find is a garden, a crude model lighthouse and another Stevenson plaque. This one says:

“SKERRYVORE.

“This garden was designed and constructed by the Bournemouth Corporation in 1957 as a memorial to Robert Louis Stevenson who occupied the house on this site from April, 1885 until August, 1887. The house, which was destroyed by enemy bombing on 16th November, 1940, was named after the Skerryvore lighthouse built by the Stevenson family firm off the Argyle coast and from which this model is copied. Stevenson wrote many books while residing at Skerryvore, including ‘Kidnapped’ and ‘The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.'”