“This is the biography of an extraordinary family, an impossible sea & an engineering miracle”
Bella Bathurst’s THE LIGHTHOUSE STEVENSONS tells the story of Robert Louis Stevenson’s ancestors – 4 generations who designed & built the great lights around Scotland
4/4
https://bellabathurst.com/books/the-lighthouse-stevensons/
#Scottish #literature #RobertLouisStevenson #19thcentury #Victorian #lighthouse #lighthouses #engineering #InternationalLighthouseWeekend
‘Whenever I smell salt water, I know that I am not farm from one of the works of my ancestors. The Bell Rock stands monument for my grandfather, the Skerry Vhor for my Uncle Alan, and when the lights come out at sundown along the shores of Scotland, I am proud to think they burn […]
Say not of me that weakly I declined
The labours of my sires, and fled the sea,
The towers we founded and the lamps we lit,
To play at home with paper like a child…
—Robert Louis Stevenson’s apologia for deserting the family trade of lighthouse-building & taking up the pen, instead
3/4
#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #RobertLouisStevenson #19thcentury #Victorian #lighthouse #lighthouses #engineering #InternationalLighthouseWeekend
“The necessity for marked characteristics in coast illumination increases with the number of lights…”
—“On a New Form of Intermittent Light for Lighthouses” – one of Robert Louis Stevenson’s lesser-known works, read before the Royal Scottish Society of Arts on 27 March 1871, & awarded the Society’s Silver Medal
2/4
https://digital.nls.uk/rlstevenson/browse/archive/99383648
#Scottish #literature #RobertLouisStevenson #19thcentury #Victorian #lighthouse #lighthouses #engineering #InternationalLighthouseWeekend
I send to you, commissioners,
A paper that may please ye, sirs
(For troth they say it might be worse
An’ I believe’t)…
—Robert Louis Stevenson, “To the Commissioners of Northern Lights”, which Stevenson sent to them along with his design for “a new form of intermittent light”
1/4
#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #Scots #ScotsLanguage #RobertLouisStevenson #19thcentury #Victorian #lighthouse #lighthouses #engineering #InternationalLighthouseWeekend
Assoc for Scottish Literature