Lighthouse Stevensons
Bella Bathurst
The same driven energy which Robert Louis Stevenson put into writing, his ancestors put into lighting the darkness of the seas. This text tells the tale of the Lighthouse Stevensons who built the lighthouses of the Scottish coast against impossible odds.
Posted by drew_gummerson@abctales.com (1 year ago ) You know a book is good when you bore everyone to death around you with it. For the last week I've been talking about lighthouses. 'Look at this,' I say as I pass idle strangers in the street. I flick to the photos in the middle. 'That's Muckle Flugga, it was built by RLS's dad.' (It is the most northern of the lighthouses - built in the 1850s to aid travel of ships during the war with Russia.)
I didn't know about the Stevenson family. RLS's grandfather was the first of the Lighthouse Stevensons, born in 1772. The last of them died in 1971. For 200 years they were involved in the construction of lighthouses around Scotland.
Skerryvore is my favourite. It stands on an outcrop of rock 13 miles out to sea. Built in the 19th century, every rock was hand-carved and taken out to the site and pulled off a boat and up a steep cliff-face.
But the details are amazing. The family organised everything - each lighthouse keeper was allowed two cows and grazing land. The books in each lighthouse were the same.
The time was also the birth of Scotland as we now know it. The Stevensons were involved in every public work - bridges, harbours, roads, and so on.
When Alan died, he knew 8 languages fluently, he had a number of degrees. He was an architect, engineer, boss, poet, translator, inventor and so on and so on.
I recommend this book - it is full of wonder.
No groups are currently reading this book.
technical book, not my style but... said Bookworm225