the beacon house
Books
- Eleven Miles Out Robert Stevenson, John Rennie, and the Building of the Bell Rock Lighthouse · Liszt Think
Eleven miles off the Scottish coast, a reef lies submerged for twenty hours a day. In the early nineteenth century, raising a granite tower on this treacherous foundation seemed impossible.
- The Beacon House on the Rock…merely access to the rock but residence upon it, a fixed point from which work could proceed independent of the weather-lashed supply ship. The beacon house was his answer. It would stand six-legged on the reef’s highest point, a wooden tower thirty feet high with living quarters for up to fifte…
- The Courses Cut at Arbroath…chaos was answered by the discipline of measurement. Back in January 1809, while winter gales still pinned the Smeaton to its moorings and the beacon house stood empty on the Bell Rock, master mason Francis Watt held a wooden template against a block of Mull granite and found the dovetailed joi…
- The Pharos and the Rising Tide…r, every fumbled cable or misjudged groundswell, cost a day of lost work that the season could not replace. The third season had begun with the beacon house already standing on its six iron legs. The wooden tower rose thirty feet above the reef, the first habitable structure ever to occupy that…