The Lighthouse Stevensons: The Extraordinary Story of the Building of the Scottish Lighthouses by the Ancestors of Robert Louis Stevenson

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As at Bell Rock even bringing in construction materials was a challenge as the rocks had no anchorages, the boats bobbed about while they craned great dressed stones on to the site. Bathurst also gives us a precise on Eddystone, a rock lighthouse off the Cornish coast, built by John Smeaton, regarded as the father of civil engineering. The workforce suffered from sea sickness and inadequate quantities of beer, traditionally lighthouse keepers were expected to maintain a cow and fend for themselves, Skerryvore was so difficult to reach that instead Alan recommended enhanced rations for the lighthouse keepers. Starting at the end of the 18 th century, the men of this family undertook the design and construction of dozens of lighthouses along the rugged Scottish coast. Robert Louis Stevenson, author of classics like Kidnapped and Treasure Island, was Robert’s grandson (and Alan’s nephew), and much of his own accounts of his family history inform this work.

How they triumphed when all the odds were against them - lack of formal education, absence of adequate health care, career blocking social stratification, religious prejudice, penury, "primitive" technology, mortally destructive forces of nature, back breaking working conditions - the list goes on and yet they plunged forward with their determination to improve whatever they found wanting. The most famous member of the family, Robert Stevenson, set off a chain of events that eventually led to him and his descendants designing many notable Scottish lighthouses over some 150 years. But aside from a natural desire to read about nineteenth century civil engineering cruelly destroying the economies of local communities that benefited from wrecked ships and an understandable compulsion to know how a 19th century engineer monetised and publicised their work we're reading to understand Robert Louis Stevenson, a book like this and Bathurst says that he was the Stevenson she was most in love with, is part of the archaeology of his (un)consciousness and mental world.Stevenson was also known for developing city infrastructure, including railway lines, bridges such as Scotland’s Regent Bridge (1814) and monuments such as the Melville Monument in Edinburgh (1821).

From Biographical Sketch of the Late Robert Stevenson: Civil Engineer, by Alan Stevenson (1807-1865). In Bella Bathurst's fascinating history, we are taken on a journey that encompasses four generations of Stevenson's and four iconic Scottish lighthouses, starting with Robert Stevenson (1772 - 1850), the famous author's grandfather, who, in partnership with his own stepfather, developed the career of "lighthouse engineer" and built the famous (and many deemed impossible) Bell Rock Lighthouse. Here is a family of engineers who spanned four generations and produced a children's story author, Robert Louis Stevenson, Tusitala, the teller of tales. His skills as an editor would have helped this otherwise fascinating account of the Stevenson lighthouses. Of the hundred thousand or so people employed on the sea in the 1750s, between 30% to 40% would not have survived to see old age.An interesting history of the family who built lighthouses in Scotland and beyond, whose family name was immortalised by the author Robert Louis Stevenson, along with a select few of the works … I would have rated it higher but for the authors annoying habit of repeating information, two or more times throughout the book.