Shedding light on why beacon must be saved
(Story dated: Thursday, August 17, 2006)

The Dennis Head beacon on North Ronaldsay features in this week’s Restoration Village programme tomorrow night, Friday, at 9pm, on BBC2. Margaret Carr looks at why North Ronaldsay needs votes.

Billy Muir, left, chairman of the North Ronaldsay Trust, shows visitors around the old beacon at Dennis Head.

The ball of top of North Ronaldsay’s old beacon could be in danger of dropping through the middle of the tower.

Nobody knows for sure.

Billy Muir, lighthouse keeper and chairman of the North Ronaldsay Trust, said the timbers on the inside of the tower appeared to be falling away.

“It may all fall in,” he said.

“We don’t know if the timber was just used for construction or if it has some meaningful purpose.”

Unless money is found to fund the examination and any repairs to the beacon, it could collapse - meaning the loss of a unique piece of maritime history - the oldest purpose-built light beacon in Scotland.

The population of North Ronaldsay in 1789, when the beacon was built, was 550. Today, there are only 57 folk living on the island.

The trust hopes the restoration of the lighthouse will help the island survive.

Without money and people coming into North Ronaldsay, its future is bleak.

Three-quarters of the population is aged over 50 and there is not likely to be an influx of younger people, without some employment being created.

The trust has made a start. At the 152-year-old “new” lighthouse, some of the old buildings now house a woollen mill and a small shop.

Funding has come through to enable the trust to convert some of the lightkeepers’ cottages to self-catering accommodation and to establish a cafe and a bigger shop.

An interpretation centre with educational resources will also be funded by the £300,000 from the Heritage Lottery Fund.

To make the story of the lighthouses complete, the trust wants to establish a trail leading visitors along to the old beacon.

The plan is to stabilise and repair the beacon, remove more than a century’s accumulated bird droppings, reinstate the stairs, which were removed to stop youngsters climbing the tower, and the viewing balcony around the outside.

“No-one in living memory has been to the top,” Billy said.

Eventually the trust hopes to rebuild the lightkeeper’s cottage and kit it out as it would have been in 1789, and get a replica lantern and reflectors to show how the original lighting system worked.

This would be at ground level and is unlikely to be fuelled by whale oil as was the original lantern!

The beacon was the first in Orkney and only the third in Scotland, and its site was recommended by Murdoch Mackenzie, the Orcadian who invented marine charts as we know them and who became the navy’s first hydrographic surveyor.

When he was promoting his venture to carry out the first survey of British waters, Mackenzie wrote:

How very serviceable it would be to a great Part of the trading Nations in Europe to have the Orkneys rightly navigate, will be obvious, from their Situation, to all acquainted with mercantile Business: and will also appear from the vast number of Ship-wrecks that happen there. On this small Island of N. Ronaldsha alone, about twenty British and Dutch vessels have been lost within the last 30 or 40 years many of them with very Valuable Cargoes, besides a much greater number on other Parts of that Coast; most of which might have been prevented by such a Chart of these Islands as is here proposed.

Mackenzie’s Orkney maps were published as an atlas of eight charts (five of Orkney and three of Lewis) in May, 1750, with Kirkwall taken as the meridian rather than Greenwich.

The Royal Navy had been embarrassed by its failure to catch Bonnie Prince Charlie, blaming it on the lack of accurate charts when he escaped by sea after the Battle of Culloden.

As British trade increased, so did the number of shipwrecks. There were 16 around North Ronaldsay between 1773 and 1788.

The Northern Lighthouse Board was set up by an Act of Parliament in 1786, with Kinnaird Head and the Mull of Kintyre lights being set up before North Ronaldsay.

Construction began in 1788 under the supervision of the engineer Thomas Smith, an Edinburgh light maker and prolific lighthouse builder. Assisting Smith was his stepson Robert Stevenson, first of the famous family of engineers and grandfather to Robert Louis Stevenson.

By 1789, the beacon - a 70-foot tower in undressed stone - had been completed, along with a lightkeeper’s dwelling, a store, probably for whale oil, and dry stone punds for keeping sheep off the arable areas.

“We plan to reinstate the interior of the house, with box-bed and so on,” said Billy, “provided we get all the necessary permissions from Historic Scotland.

“We do have the original plans, so that makes life much easier if we go to reinstate.

“The contract to build it turned up at Balfour Castle. It was awarded to John White for something like £199, with ironwork in addition, for the balcony rail.”

The beacon was topped with a cluster of oil-burning lamps with copper reflectors. The lighthouse board gave instructions to the keepers that the reflectors were to be cleaned with a soft linen rag and Spanish white or powdered chalk.

In 1802, it was decided to establish a new light at Start Point, on Sanday. Technology had moved on and the first revolving reflectors were available. Start Point was the first lighthouse to use a revolving system.

When the Dennis Head beacon was decommissioned, the ball of masonry was taken off the unlit original tower at Start Point and put on top of the North Ronaldsay beacon to cap it off when the lantern was removed.

The beacon had been causing problems anyway, with ships mistaking it for a boat at anchor and moving closer inshore.

As the years passed, however, it became clear that North Ronaldsay still needed a light to give maximum warning of the Reef Dyke and the Seal Skerry.

Alan Stevenson, son of Robert, reported to the light commissioners that a high tower was unavoidable because of the low-lying land and because it needed an extensive range.

“In a situation where there are no good materials for masonry and to which every thing must be transported by sea under all the disadvantages of bad anchorage and difficult landing, the elevation of 130ft, which I have found necessary to give to the Tower, must involve a larger outlay than usual,” he wrote.

“I have, accordingly, introduced brick work as affording greater facility of shipment.”

The commissioners accepted the lowest price, £6,181-8-7 (£6,181.44), submitted by William Kinghorn, a Leith builder.

The finished tower was 139 feet high and is still the tallest land-based lighthouse in the UK.

In 1889 it was painted with two white bands so it could be used as a day mark.

The pier built about 1864-65 to strict instructions from Alan Stevenson, survives near the old beacon. The iron banding was damaged at the beginning of 2005 and the trust also plans to repair this.

The cost of the project proposed for Restoration Village is £1.5 million plus VAT.

“If we don’t win, we’ll definitely go back to Heritage Lottery with a bid to complete the site,” Billy said. “We’ve put too much work into it now not to follow it up.”

North Ronaldsay has support south.

In a letter to The Scotsman on July 27, Professor Roland Paxton, from the School of the Built Environment at Heriot-Watt University, wrote of the beacon’s importance.

“In fact, the present lighthouse is far from being only a landmark and is arguably, with its ingeniously designed dome-shaped roof supporting a large stone ball, Scotland’s most distinctive unlit seamark and unique,” he said.

“This ball was first erected at Start Point Lighthouse in 1802 under Thomas Smith and Robert Stevenson’s direction and relocated to its current position in 1809.

“The present structure is therefore a unique element of Scotland’s lighthouse history on both its 1789 and 1809 counts and well worthy of preservation.”