Up close, Girdle Ness Lighthouse looks more solid and imposing than you might expect from a structure built in 1833.
Stretching 37 metres into the sky near to Aberdeen Harbour, the lighthouse celebrates its 190th birthday this year with no plans to retire.
More than a century and a half its junior, 24-year-old James Addison is about five years into his career with the Northern Lighthouse Board (NLB), and Girdle Ness is one of his many charges. Bright-eyed and unfazed by the 182-step climb to the top of the lighthouse, Addison is full of warm, enthusiastic energy. Granted, he’d struggle without it.
As a member of one of several teams of constantly travelling technicians, he spends his working days sailing, flying but mainly driving around Scotland, helping to maintain and repair the lamps inside the country’s 200-odd lighthouses. Though Addison was first interested in mechanical engineering, he secured an electrical apprenticeship with the NLB, learned the ropes and fell in love with keeping the lights on.
At the top of Girdle Ness’s narrow, spiralling stone stairs, which are painted a striking crimson red, there are two short ladders. Climbing them takes you up into the glass dome which houses the lamp – the lantern room. Through triangular panes, the North Sea seems to stretch endlessly ahead while the Granite City sprawls behind. The sky is blue and the sun warm, turning the space into a sweltering hothouse.
Addison explains how, at night, the large piece of machinery dominating the centre of the room spins, creating the life-saving flashes mariners see from their vessels. Automated in 1991 (years before the technician was even born), this light set-up is big, somewhat clunky, not as eco-friendly as the NLB would like. The technician holds up his mobile phone, swiping through photos to show examples of the most up-to-date, freshly fitted lamps – they are much smaller, just as powerful and virtually self-sufficient.
The lights can now be monitored remotely using computers, with retained lightkeepers employed by the NLB to be occasional eyes and ears on the ground at most locations. Long gone are the days of live-in lighthouse keepers. “Definitely a lot has changed since then,” says Addison, “These sites only tend to get visited once a year, whereas back then they were on site every day, and for maybe a month or so at a time.”
Continual advancements in technology have indeed changed the NLB’s approach since it was established as the Commissioners of Northern Light Houses in 1786, but the game essentially remains the same. “What we’re doing is keeping a safe and reliable system of aids to navigation for the protection of mariners and the environment,” says chief executive, Mike Bullock, “And that’s what Robert Stevenson and his team were doing. The job is actually remarkably similar.”
Sustainability is at the heart of the operation
Though you may be more familiar with the literary work of his grandson, Robert Louis Stevenson, Glasgow-born Robert Stevenson is the most famous civil engineer the NLB ever had. He is credited with designing 19 lighthouses during his career, including both Girdle Ness and one of the oldest of its kind surviving in the world today – the sea-washed Bell Rock, located off the coast of Angus.
“Bell Rock has been operating since 1811, and it’s still going today,” says Bullock, “The very infrastructure that Robert Stevenson did this with – we’re using the same stuff.”
Nodding towards Edinburgh’s George Street, where NLB headquarters have been located for 190 years, he adds: “There are banks along here which are now pubs, but our lighthouses are still lighthouses.”
The majority of Scotland’s hard-working lighthouses have been standing for over 100 years, and some for much longer. Some were purpose-built, others retrofitted. Several look distinctly unlike the rest: a good example is the gothic tower, Duart Point, on the East Coast of Mull, which was built in 1900 as a lighthouse, but also as a memorial to the Scottish novelist William Black.
Floating buoys (of which the NLB looks after more than 170) can easily be stripped down without chemicals, repainted and reused. As a result, some of the ones currently in use are more than 60 years old.
Far from being stuck in the past, however, the outfit aims to be continually pushing forward when it comes to technology – and the greener, the better. “There’s lots of activity going on,” says Bullock, “Most of our stations are now solar powered, which takes out the need for diesel generators.
“We do have some which still have diesel generators out there because there is no alternative. But what we are doing is, where we can, putting in a new generation of diesel generators so there’s a much lower use of fuel, they are much cleaner, and so on.
“That holy trinity of solar panels, LED lights and better batteries means you can survive through the winter. Previously, as little as 10 years ago, we would have to go out and in the midwinter to recharge the batteries because there wasn’t enough solar gain.”
While sustainability is little more than a buzzword for some businesses, it truly appears to be at the very heart of how the NLB operates. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that the organisation is taking the climate change emergency seriously. Exposed to the elements while looking after Scotland’s most remote lighthouses, technicians see first-hand the increasing regularity and severity of extreme storms.
“There are some times where you can be out there and getting ready and excited to come off the next day because you’ve got plans for the weekend,” explains Addison, “And then the weather comes in and you can’t get off.”
‘You could work for a living, but it’s better than that’
Dealing with the unexpected is clearly a big part of the job. So too is staying calm and cheerful in less than ideal circumstances – as demonstrated when the technician steps out onto the exterior platform at the top of Girdle Ness and is immediately pelted with bird droppings, which land on one shoulder of his neat, NLB-issue navy-blue T-shirt.
It’s surprisingly quiet and calm at the lighthouse’s summit, despite strong gusts of wind. The breeze is a welcome break from the stuffiness inside. Undeterred by mischievous seabirds, Addison is effusive about what he does for work: “I’d recommend this job to anyone – anyone that likes adventure and exploring the whole of Scotland. It’s good fun. You could work for a living, but it’s better than that.”
Nevertheless, leaning on the metal rail in front of him and looking out to sea as he talks, he acknowledges that very few of his days are spent at home in Fife, and that the transient technician lifestyle isn’t necessarily for everybody.
Camaraderie and maintaining morale when working and staying in remote locations is key, and food plays a big role in that, with NLB staff taking turns to cook for their colleagues. On a recent trip offshore, he says, a table tennis tournament kept everybody entertained and in good spirits.
The traditional keepers’ cottages at the foot of many lighthouses were sold off years ago; several are now available to rent as holiday accommodation. More often than not, visiting NLB staff stay in nearby hotels and B&Bs. But, in more remote spots, they bunk together in the same quarters as several generations of their predecessors did.
Now a mainly office-based planning engineer, Craig Pake has been working with the NLB for 25 years. He spent around nine of those doing electrical maintenance on site at the same lighthouses James Addison currently takes care of.
“Stroma, which is in the Pentland Firth, has four big bedrooms. There’s a big bathroom with a bath and a shower. You’ve got your big communal area for the TV, and you’ve got the kitchen and dining room. Muckle Flugga [in Shetland] is the same,” says Pake.
And if anyone is interested in seeing the interior of the lighthouse, here's a photo of the kitchen #BellRock #Lighthouse #Scotland pic.twitter.com/65vgYtSpii
— Northern Lighthouse Board (@NLB_UK) September 14, 2023
“But then you maybe go up to North Rona [around 44 miles north-east of Lewis] where, basically, it’s a square room. Obviously there’s a toilet, but the kitchen and the bedrooms are in one area.
“And then you’ve got Pillar Rock, Chicken Rock, Dubh Artach, Skerryvore and Bell Rock, where your kitchen area is your TV area as well, at night. So everything’s got to be tidied away.
“There’s days where you struggle to get outside just because the wind’s that bad and the spray from the sea, and even snow. And then, other times, you’re sitting on the helipad at night with a cup of tea, just relaxing. There’s no nuisance light – it’s just total dark, and the stars.”
Pake smiles as he speaks, relaying what are clearly fond memories. “I was listening to an old Coldplay album just the other day, and it took me back to Muckle Flugga,” he says. Around that time, more than two decades ago, he would use the phone box in the fishing village of Portmahomack, close to Tarbat Ness lighthouse, to call his girlfriend (now his wife) when they first started going out. In the evenings, he would flick through copies of National Geographic magazine dating back to the early 1950s, left behind by former live-in keepers.
‘Working museum’ lighthouses will always be needed
Inside Girdle Ness, relics of the past include the unused gallery about a third of the way up the lighthouse, where a second, lower light used to shine, until it was discontinued in 1890. At ground level, the staircase continues downwards for some distance to a big, almost empty basement room. Here, Addison explains, large canisters were once housed, back in the days when the lamp was powered by gas, piped many metres from under the ground up to the sky.
Further up the coast from Aberdeen, Fraserburgh is home to the popular Museum of Scottish Lighthouses, located at Scotland’s first mainland lighthouse, Kinnaird Head Castle. But, by default, virtually every lighthouse in the country is a working museum of sorts, cataloguing an evolution of both technological and human history.
The traditions, tales (spooky or otherwise) and aims of the first lighthouse keepers have been preserved, even as the story has carried on and been added to by those who came after. “We talk about satellite navigation and everybody assumes that, somehow, the work we do will no longer be required”, says CEO Bullock, “I don’t think that’s the case – not in my lifetime, anyway.”
Reliability and continuity are two cornerstones of the NLB’s past and future. The lighthouses themselves have become symbols of that dedication to protecting and saving lives which, perhaps, is why – over the centuries – we humans have romanticised and come to feel a strong connection to these quirky buildings. They represent unwavering hope; a literal and metaphorical light during the darkest of times.
‘We’re just custodians for a little while’
When the NLB was formed in 1786, lighthouses were not a popular concept. Shipwrecks could mean big business for landowners, and some people believed stopping them from happening amounted to interfering with God’s will. Jump forward a couple of hundred years, and they are so beloved that the organisation receives complaints (from landlubbers, not mariners) if the upgrading of lights changes a lighthouse’s “look”.
The LED lamps NLB technicians fit nowadays are small enough to sit on your fingertip, and modern lighthouses – flat-pack aluminium lattice towers – are nicknamed “Ikeas”. “I think if Robert Stevenson was here today, he would put that in rather than these,” says Bullock, gesturing first to an image of a modern tower, then a traditional lighthouse. “But we’ve got these and they’re marvellous buildings, so we’ve got to look after them.”
Inside 119-year-old Hyskeir Lighthouse, marking the southern end of the Minch, the lens sits on a bath of mercury, posing obvious safety risks. The NLB’s plan is to remove the dangerous mercury and fit modern lights on the structure’s balcony.
The original lens, however, will not be discarded but covered (to avoid the risk of fires) and left respectfully alone. “Rather than rip it out, we’re going to leave it in situ. And, maybe in a further 30 years’ time, we’ll do something different,” explains Bullock. “I think most of us are very aware that we’re just custodians for a little while.”
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