"Having crept upon deck about four in the morning, I find we are beating to windward off the Isle of Tyree, with the determination on the part of Mr. Stevenson that his constituents should visit a reef of rocks called Skerry Vhor, where he thought it would be essential to have a lighthouse. Loud remonstrances on the part of the commissioners, who one and all declare they will subscribe to his opinion, whatever it may be, rather than continue this dreadful buffeting. Quiet perseverance on the part of Mr. Stevenson, and great kicking, bouncing, and squabbling upon that of the yacht, who seems to like the idea of Skerry Vhor as little as the commissioners. At length, by dint of exertion, came in sight of this long range of rocks (chiefly under water), on which the tide breaks in a most tremendous style. There appear a few low broad rocks at one end of the reef which is about a mile in length. These are never entirely under water, though the surf dashes over them. We took possession of it in the name of the commissioners, and generously bestowed our own great names on its crags and creeks. The rock was carefully measured by Mr. Stevenson. It will be a most desolate position for a lighthouse—the Bell Rock and Eddystone a joke to it, for the nearest land is the wild island of Tyree, at 14 miles distance."

Such is an entry in the diary of Sir Walter Scott's Yacht Tour, on the 27th August 1814; but although the necessity of a lighthouse on the Skerry Vhor, or, as it is now generally called, Skerryvore, was fully acknowledged by the authorities, it was not till twenty-four years afterwards that the undertaking was actually commenced, under the superintendence of Mr. Alan Stevenson, the son of the eminent engineer who erected the Bell Rock Lighthouse.

In the execution of this great work, if the son had, as compared with his father, certain advantages in his favour, he had also various disadvantages to contend with at Skerryvore from which the engineer of the Bell Rock was free. Mr. Alan Stevenson had steam power at his command, and the benefit of all the experience derived from the experiments of his predecessors in similar operations; but at the same time, the rock on which he had to work was at a greater distance from the land, and separated from it by a more dangerous passage than that of either the Bell or the Eddystone; and the geological formation of which the rock is composed, was much more difficult to work upon. The Skerryvore is distant from Tyree, the nearest inhabited island, about 11 miles; even in fine weather the intervening passage is a trying one, and in rough weather no ship can live in such a sea, studded as it is with treacherous rocks. The sandstone of the Bell Rock is worn into rugged inequalities, which favoured the operations of the engineer; but the action of the waves on the igneous formation of the Skerryvore has given it all the smoothness and slippery polish of a mass of dark coloured glass. Indeed, the foreman of the masons, on first visiting the rock, not unjustly compared the operation of ascending it to that of "climbing up the neck of a bottle."

The 7th August 1838 was the first day of entire work on the rock, and with succeeding ones was spent in the erection of a temporary barrack of wood, for the men to lodge in on the rock. It was completed before the season closed; but one of the first heavy gales in November wrenched it from its holdings, and swept it into the sea, leaving nothing to mark the site but a few broken and twisted stanchions, attached to one of which was a portion of a great beam which had been shaken and rent, by dashing against the rocks, into a bundle of ribands. Thus in one night were obliterated the results of a whole season's toil, and with them, the hopes the men cherished of having a dwelling on the rock, instead of on board the brig, where they suffered intensely from the miseries of constant sickness.

The excavation of the foundations occupied the whole of the summer season of 1839, from the 6th May to the 3d September. The hard, nitrified rock held out stoutly against the assaults of both iron and gunpowder; and much time was spent in hollowing out the basin in which the lighthouse was to be fixed. From the limited extent of the rock and the absence of any place of shelter, the blasting was an operation of considerable danger, as the men had no place to run to, and it had to be managed with great caution. Only a small portion of the rock could be blown up at a time, and care had to be taken to cover the part over with mats and nettings made of old rope to check the flight of the stones. The excavation of the flinty mass occupied nearly two summers.

The operations of 1840 included, much to the delight of the workmen, the reconstruction of the barrack, to which they were glad to remove from the tossing vessel. The second edifice was more substantial than the first, and proved more enduring. Rude and narrow as it was, it offered, after the discomforts of the vessel, almost a luxurious lodging to its hardy inmates.

"Packed 40 feet above the weather-beaten rock, in this singular abode," writes the engineer, Mr. Alan Stevenson, "with a goodly company of thirty men, I have spent many a weary day and night, at those times when the sea prevented any one going down to the rock, anxiously looking for supplies from the shore, and earnestly longing for a change of weather favourable to the recommencement of the works. For miles around nothing could be seen but white foaming breakers, and nothing heard but howling winds and lashing waves. Our slumbers, too, were at times fearfully interrupted by the sudden pouring of the sea over the roof, the rocking of the house on its pillars, and the spurting of water through the seams of the doors and windows; symptoms which, to one suddenly aroused from sound sleep, recalled the appalling fate of the former barrack, which had been engulphed in the foam not twenty yards from our dwelling, and for a moment seemed to summon us to a similar fate. On two occasions in particular, these sensations were so vivid as to cause almost every one to spring out of bed; and some of the men fled from the barrack by a temporary gangway to the more stable, but less comfortable shelter afforded by the bare walls of the lighthouse tower, then unfinished, where they spent the remainder of the night in the darkness and the cold."

In spite of their anxiety to get on with the work, and their intrepidity in availing themselves of every opportunity, these gallant men were often forced by stress of weather into an inactivity which we may be sure they felt sadly irksome and against the grain. "At such seasons," says Mr. Stevenson, "much of our time was spent in bed, for there alone we had effectual shelter from the winds and the spray which reached every cranny in the walls of our barrack." On one occasion they were for fourteen days without communication with the shore, and when at length the seas subsided, and they were able to make the signal to Tyree that a landing at the rock was practicable, scarcely twenty-four hours' stock of provisions remained on the rock. In spite of hardships and perils, however, the engineer declares that "life on the Skerryvore Rock was by no means destitute of its peculiar pleasures. The grandeur of the ocean's rage—the deep murmur of the waves—the hoarse cry of the sea birds, which wheeled continually over us, especially at our meals—the low moaning of the wind—or the gorgeous brightness of a glossy sea and a cloudless sky—and the solemn stillness of a deep blue vault, studded with stars, or cheered by the splendours of the full moon,—were the phases of external things that often arrested our thoughts in a situation where, with all the bustle that sometimes prevailed, there was necessarily so much time for reflection. Those changes, together with the continual succession of hopes and fears connected with the important work in which we were engaged, and the oft recurring calls for advice or direction, as well as occasional hours devoted to reading and correspondence, and the pleasures of news from home, were more than sufficient to reconcile me to—nay, to make me really enjoy—an uninterrupted residence, on one occasion, of not less than five weeks on that desert rock."

The Skerryvore Lighthouse was at length successfully completed. The height of the tower is 138 feet 6 inches, of which the first 26 feet is solid. It contains a mass of stone work of more than double the quantity of the Bell Rock, and nearly five times that of the Eddystone. The entire cost, including steam tug and the building of a small harbour at Hynish for the reception of the little vessel that now attends the lighthouse, was £86,977. The light is revolving, and reaches its brightest state once every minute. It is produced by the revolution of eight great annular lenses around a central light, with four wicks, and can be seen from the deck of a vessel at the distance of 18 miles. Mr. Alan Stevenson sums up his deeply interesting narrative in the following words: "In such a situation as the Skerryvore, innumerable delays and disappointments were to be expected by those engaged in the work; and the entire loss of the fruit of the first season's labour in the course of a few hours, was a good lesson in the school of patience, and of trust in something better than an arm of flesh. During our progress, also, cranes and other materials were swept away by the waves; vessels were driven by sudden gales to seek shelter at a distance from the rocky shores of Mull and Tyree; and the workmen were left on the rock desponding and idle, and destitute of many of the comforts with which a more roomy and sheltered dwelling, in the neighbourhood of friends, is generally connected. Daily risks were run in landing on the rock in a heavy surf, in blasting the splintery gneiss, or by the falling of heavy bodies from the tower on a narrow space below, to which so many persons were necessarily confined. Yet had we not any loss of either life or limb; and although our labours were prolonged from dawn to night, and our provisions were chiefly salt, the health of the people, with the exception of a few slight cases of dysentery, was generally good throughout the six successive summers of our sojourn on the rock. The close of the work was welcomed with thankfulness by all engaged in it; and our remarkable preservation was viewed, even by many of the most thoughtless, as, in a peculiar manner, the gracious work of Him by whom the very hairs of our heads are all numbered!"