The Northern Lighthouse Board
Founded in an Age of Shipwreck
Scotland's western and northern coasts were, in the eighteenth century, among the most treacherous in the world for merchant shipping. The Hebrides and the Pentland Firth were strewn with unlit rocks, and the passage between the Orkney Islands and the Scottish mainland claimed dozens of vessels each year. The winters were long, the weather violent, and the commerce flowing through these waters — coal from the Forth, cattle from the west coast, timber and grain from the Baltic — was of growing economic importance to the newly formed Kingdom of Great Britain.
The Commissioners of Northern Lighthouses were established by an Act of Parliament in 1786, which appointed nineteen commissioners including the lord lieutenants and sheriffs of the relevant counties, together with the lord provosts of Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Aberdeen. Their charge was to erect and maintain lighthouses on the Scottish coast and, later, on the Isle of Man. The body has operated continuously ever since, eventually becoming known simply as the Northern Lighthouse Board (NLB), headquartered in George Street, Edinburgh.
The same Act that created the Board also allocated its first four lighthouse sites: Kinnaird Head on the Buchan coast, the Mull of Kintyre at the southern tip of the Kintyre peninsula, North Ronaldsay at the top of Orkney, and Eilean Glas on Scalpay off Harris. All four were lit by 1789, with Thomas Smith, Edinburgh's pioneering street-lighting engineer, appointed as the first engineer to the Board.
Thomas Smith and the Stevensons
Thomas Smith brought to lighthouse engineering the same entrepreneurial energy that was transforming Scottish industrial life. He devised a system of silver-coated reflectors arranged around oil lamps that multiplied the effective brightness of a single flame severalfold — a Scottish parallel to the Argand lamp being refined in France at the same moment. Smith trained his stepson, Robert Stevenson, as his assistant; and Robert Stevenson went on to become one of the most celebrated civil engineers of the nineteenth century, responsible not only for the Bell Rock Lighthouse but for more than twenty other Scottish lights.
The Stevenson dynasty continued unbroken through Robert's three sons — Alan, David, and Thomas — and into the next generation, spanning roughly a century of lighthouse construction. Alan Stevenson designed the exquisite Skerryvore tower off Tiree (1844), which rises 49 metres above the Atlantic and is often cited as the most elegant lighthouse ever built. David Stevenson designed Dhu Heartach (1872) and several lights on the mainland coast. Thomas Stevenson, father of the novelist Robert Louis Stevenson, invented the louvred screen and the azimuthal condensing system that improved the performance of dioptric lenses, and he designed Cape Wrath, Ardnamurchan, and other prominent stations. Robert Louis Stevenson himself spent childhood summers at lighthouse stations with his father, and the sea and its dangers permeate his fiction.
The Bell Rock Lighthouse
No achievement of the NLB attracts more attention than the Bell Rock Lighthouse, constructed between 1807 and 1811 on a submerged sandstone reef twelve miles south-east of Arbroath. The reef, also known as the Inchcape Rock, was exposed for only a brief period at low water; workers could spend perhaps three or four hours on the rock before the tide returned. Robert Stevenson directed the construction, drawing on but substantially improving the precedent set by John Smeaton's Eddystone Lighthouse.
Bell Rock stands 35.3 metres tall, built from interlocking courses of Craigleith sandstone and Aberdeen granite. The lowest courses are solid masonry; the upper section contains the stair, service room, and lamp room. When the light was first exhibited in February 1811, its Argand lamp and reflector array produced a light character of alternate red and white flashes visible in clear conditions to about 15 nautical miles. Today it shows a white flashing light — Fl(1) W — with a range of 18 nautical miles and has been fully automated since 1988.
Muckle Flugga and the Northern Extremity
The most northerly lighthouse in the United Kingdom stands on a jagged stack called Muckle Flugga, a hundred metres above the sea at latitude 60°51'N, just north of the island of Unst in Shetland. David and Thomas Stevenson built the original rubble tower in 1854 as a temporary structure, replaced it with the permanent granite tower in 1858, and completed the light in the most exposed and logistically challenging circumstances the Board had then encountered. Supplies had to be landed in small boats on a tiny ledge; during Atlantic gales the spray reached the lantern room at a height of 66 metres above sea level.
Muckle Flugga was automated in 1995, one of the last crewed NLB stations to lose its keepers. Its Fl(2) W 20s character — two flashes every twenty seconds — and its range of 22 nautical miles mark the passage between the Atlantic and the North Sea. The rock's remoteness has made it a pilgrimage site for lighthouse enthusiasts, reachable by boat from Burrafirth on Unst when weather permits.
The Cape Wrath and Ardnamurchan Stations
Cape Wrath, the north-west corner of the British mainland, takes its name not from the English word but from the Norse hvarf, meaning 'turning point' — the point at which Viking ships swung from their north–south passage along the Scottish coast to head west into the Minch. Thomas Stevenson completed the tower there in 1828; it stands 20 metres tall and its light has a range of 22 nautical miles across the Pentland Firth approaches. The station is accessible only by a passenger ferry across the Kyle of Durness and a minibus across a military firing range, which gives Cape Wrath an air of genuine remoteness even in the visitor season.
Ardnamurchan Point, the most westerly point of the British mainland, received its lighthouse in 1849, also designed by Alan Stevenson. The tower is 36 metres tall and constructed in a distinctly Egyptian Revival style — massive tapered walls, a cornice decorated with carved papyrus — that makes it architecturally unique among Scottish lighthouses. Its white flashing light is visible for 17 nautical miles over the sound of Mull.
Automation and the Modern NLB
The Board began automating its lighthouse stations in the 1960s as part of a broader national programme, driven primarily by the high cost of keeping keepers at remote locations year-round. The last manned NLB station was Fair Isle South, on the island of Fair Isle between Orkney and Shetland, which was automated in 1998. Today all of Scotland's lighthouses are operated remotely from the Edinburgh headquarters, where a monitoring and control centre receives telemetry from every tower: lamp status, emergency light status, fog-signal operation, and structural sensors.
The NLB also operates a network of buoys, the lighthouse tender vessel NLV Pharos (used for inspection, servicing, and the relief of remote AtoN equipment), and an active programme of heritage preservation. Many lighthouse stations now have their shore accommodation managed as self-catering holiday lettings through the Lighthouse Holidays scheme, allowing visitors to stay in the keepers' cottages at Hyskeir, Tiumpan Head, Dunnet Head, and other locations.
The lights of Scotland and the Isle of Man are plotted on the Open the map, where you can filter by island group, see each light's published character, and plan coastal visits to the towers that remain open to the public.