![]() Unruly seas frequently prevented relief boats from reaching them, extending their postings long beyond the customary two months. ![]() The endless postponements of Woolf’s novel mirror the real delays suffered by lighthouse keepers in being relieved of their duties. The lighthouse on Godrevy Island in Cornwall Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo Godrevy lighthouse perches on an islet a little way offshore, prominent in views from Talland House, which her father rented for family holidays between 18. The lighthouse of her imagination was not in Scotland, as in the novel, but off the Cornish coast. Like Stevenson, Woolf was moved to write by family experience. Was it the faraway presence of his childhood? Or the stonily real edifice that now reared before him? Both, in fact. It was Woolf who first captured the buildings’ layering of identities in the moment when, after a decade, James Ramsay finally reaches the lighthouse. As architecture, they are defined by this distance from us and by a unique duality: in daylight a building, at night only a light. Lighthouses are paradoxical things – beautifully designed, but never really seen. ![]() Now … it was a stark tower on a bare rock. The Lighthouse was then a silvery, misty-looking tower with a yellow eye that opened suddenly and softly in the evening. ![]() The story of the Ramsay family’s endlessly postponed trip was a new kind of narrative with a swollen beginning, fractured middle and inconclusive end. To the Lighthouse (1927), written and published after all the major lighthouses had been built, was Woolf’s attempt to tear down Victorian literary structures. So it seems paradoxical that Virginia Woolf should choose a lighthouse as the symbol for her modernist masterpiece. The story of lighthouse-building resembles a classic Victorian novel, heroic and all-consuming, with grand themes and firmly delineated structure. Our surviving lighthouses were built by Victorians like the Stevensons. A road to be made, a tower to be built, a harbour to be constructed, a river to be trained and guided in its channel – these were the problems with which his mind was continually occupied and for these and similar ends he travelled the world for more than half a century, like an artist, notebook in hand.” Of his grandfather he wrote: “He was above all things a projector of works in the face of nature, and a modifier of nature itself. Towards the end of his life he began Records of a Family of Engineers, an account of his ancestors that reveals the awe in which he held them, driven possibly by a sense of writerly guilt at absconding from the family business. Perhaps fittingly, he died in Samoa, far off Scotland’s shores. In passages such as these, Stevenson’s lighthouse-building experiences lie half-submerged beneath his fiction. He could almost be Stevenson’s humorous caricature of his younger self, stuck toiling dutifully for the family firm. Or there is the unforgettable figure of Ben Gunn in Treasure Island, marooned for years on a remote and isolated island. Away on the lee bow, a thing like a fountain rose out of the moonlit sea, and immediately after we heard a low sound of roaring … I had begun to wonder what it was that sat so heavily upon the captain, when the brig rising suddenly on the top of a high swell, he pointed and cried to us to look. In this parable of dangerous navigation around the Scottish coast, the unmarked reef’s menace is evoked with the recoiling precision of one who had seen it first-hand. In a pivotal scene in Stevenson’s Kidnapped, set in 1751 in the aftermath of the Jacobite rebellion, David Balfour is freed from his ordeal when the ship Covenant is wrecked on the Torran Rocks. They built some fine lighthouses themselves, chief among them Alan’s Skerryvore, a colossal granite tower on a reef even more remote and inhospitable than the Bell Rock. His sons Alan, David and Thomas (respectively, Robert Louis’ two uncles and his father) were trained to continue this work. He made his name with the Bell Rock lighthouse, a beautiful tower built, miraculously, 11 miles off the coast on a half-submerged reef. Stevenson’s lighthouse-building experiences lie half-submerged beneath his fictionĮarly in the 19th century, his grandfather Robert had established Scotland’s network of lighthouses almost from scratch.
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