From Issue Six of Hidden Scotland Magazine

The Lighthouse Family

Scotland’s 207 lighthouses and the family who built them.

Words by Ben Lerwill · Photographs by Simon Hird

Printed in Issue Six of Hidden Scotland Magazine, Spring and Summer 2023.

Scotland's dramatic coastline stands dotted with 207 lighthouses – each a triumph over nature's fury. These guiding lights perch on storm-battered cliffs and remote islands, marking treacherous shores for seafarers. Behind them stands one family, the Stevensons, who over several generations built many of Scotland's lights.

The Lighthouse Family, photograph by Simon Hird Left

Inchkeith, Hoxa Head and Girdleness. Bass Rock, Sule Skerry and the Butt of Lewis. Ushenish, Rhuvaal and Muckle Flugga. The list of Scotland’s lighthouses – which now stretches to some 207 different sites around the country – reads like an atlas of places to get away from it all. These exposed, gust-blown beacons dot some of the wildest, most remote parts of the coastline, each one representing a minor miracle of engineering. They sit on cliffs, ledges, breakwaters and islands. More remarkably still, the vast majority of them were designed by multiple generations of the same family.

Their story begins with a Glaswegian sugar trader dying of fever in the Caribbean. The man was Alan Stevenson, whose 1774 death brought his family’s income to an abrupt halt. Back in Scotland he left a young wife, Jean, and a two-year-old son, Robert. The boy was sent to a charity school, then later moved to Edinburgh with his mother, where she married a lamp-maker named Thomas Smith. This simple twist of fate would shape the look of Scotland’s coastline for centuries to come.