Bell Rock Lighthouse

FACTSFact sheet

01A reef that vanishes twice a day

Bell Rock is a sandstone reef in the North Sea, about 18 kilometers from Arbroath, in the county of Angus, Scotland, in the United Kingdom. At high tide it lies under four to five meters of water; at low tide it shows for a few hours. It sits in the path of ships entering the Firth of Tay, bound for Dundee, and the Firth of Forth, bound for Edinburgh. A legend, repeated by the National Records of Scotland, says an abbot of Arbroath hung a warning bell there in the fourteenth century, and that this is where the name comes from.

A bell was not enough. In December 1799, a storm took about 70 vessels off the coasts of Fife and Angus. The wreck of HMS York, a warship lost with 491 men, was blamed on the reef, and the sources disagree on the date, which appears as 1799, late 1803 or 1804. Robert Stevenson, engineer to the Northern Lighthouses board, visited the reef in 1800 and argued for a stone tower. The first bill failed in the House of Lords in 1803. The second passed in 1806.

02Who drew the tower

On 3 December 1806, the board decided the work would be done under the direction of John Rennie, appointed chief engineer, with Stevenson as his assistant. In practice, Stevenson got the reef: he lived on the boats and in the barrack, directed the men and kept the works journal. Rennie visited the reef and sent instructions. According to research by historian Roland Paxton, published in 2011, it was Rennie who drew the elevation and gave Stevenson the data to lay out the curve of the tower's profile, wide at the bottom and slender at the top.

In 1824, Stevenson published a book about the work, with engravings and accounts, and Rennie barely appears in it. Paxton found that letters had been cut out of Stevenson's letter books, and that a report by Rennie from 1809 was left out of the book, possibly in the mid-nineteenth century. The two men's sons fought over the credit until 1848, and the families for much longer. Today Scotland's heritage body lists the lighthouse as Stevenson's design, with Rennie as consulting engineer. Both readings still stand.

03Smeaton's dovetail

The model was the Eddystone Lighthouse, which John Smeaton had raised in 1759 on a rock off Plymouth, England. Smeaton's idea was to make each course of stone work as a single piece: the blocks are dovetail-shaped, wider at one end, and lock into one another, from the center to the edge, like a jigsaw puzzle. Bell Rock was done the same way, according to Stevenson himself, and the courses were also tied to one another with oak trenails, wedges and stone joggles.

The base is not glued to the reef: it sits inside it. The men cut a foundation pit into the rock, deeper than planned, and the first courses were laid there with pozzolana mortar. The first 30 feet, about 9 meters, are solid stone, Aberdeen granite outside and sandstone inside. The rest is weight: about 2,078 tons, by Stevenson's reckoning. Each block was cut on land, in Arbroath, assembled on a platform to test the fit and only then shipped out. According to Stevenson, many blocks lost half their volume in the cutting.

The 40-ton vessel that carried the stones to the reef was named Smeaton. It was Stevenson who suggested the name, in honor of the engineer whose narrative, he wrote, would serve as a kind of manual for the job.

04Two hours per tide

Work began on 18 August 1807, when 24 artificers landed on the reef. Work went on only in summer and, at first, for about two hours at each low tide. The men lived aboard ship, suffered from seasickness and, when the tide rose, went back to the boats. One day in 1807, one of the boats broke from its moorings with men still on the reef, and on the next trip out 18 artificers refused to go.

The answer was a timber barrack on legs, raised beside the tower site on 50-foot beams. At first it served as shelter and smithy; from 1809 on, the men began living in it, first a few, then 24, and by 1810 there were 31. A rope ladder linked the barrack to the tower. Meanwhile, a light vessel, the Pharos, stayed moored near the reef from 15 September 1807 until the night the tower was lit.

The foundation stone was laid on 10 July 1808. The solid section was finished on 25 August 1809. In 1810, with the tower above the water, the working day reached nine hours, and the artificers, who earned 3 shillings and 4 pence a day, plus 6 pence per hour of overtime, began taking home more than two guineas a week, according to Stevenson. The Navy was press-ganging men in the middle of the war against Napoleon, and the men on the job were given a protection medal so they would not be taken.

05The three who did not come back

Stevenson's journal records three deaths. In September 1808, seaman James Scott, aged 18, was tying a rope to a buoy when its chain came loose from the bottom; the buoy sprang up, overturned the boat, and he, probably struck on the head, was swept away by the current. In July 1809, at the Arbroath yard, a stone slipped from the tackle and fell on laborer William Walker, who died within hours, leaving a wife and two children. In 1810, during the fitting of the lantern, smith Charles Henderson was coming down from the tower in the dark, racing a workmate, and fell from the rope ladder. He was never found.

The board paid a pension to Scott's mother and to Walker's widow. Other sources speak of at least two deaths and describe Henderson's as happening in a storm. The journal also mentions one man left disabled at the yard and another who lost a finger.

06The bill and the light

Rennie had estimated the tower at £41,844, or £42,000, as he himself rounded it. Stevenson's accounts came to £77,089 in gross spending and, after deducting what was sold or transferred, including the light vessel, to £61,331 9s. 2d. net, about 47% over Rennie's estimate. At the job's wage rate, the sum equals about 368,000 days of an artificer's pay.

The last stone was laid in the summer of 1810: the National Records of Scotland give 30 July for the last course, and Stevenson's journal gives 2 September for the last stone. The light was announced in the newspapers in December and lit on 1 February 1811. There were 24 reflectors with oil lamps, turned by clockwork and alternating white with red. In 1819, the painter J. M. W. Turner made a watercolor of the tower in the middle of a storm to illustrate Stevenson's book.

07More than two hundred years at sea

In the Second World War, the tower was strafed more than once and hit by a bomb in 1941. On 15 December 1955, an RAF helicopter carrying newspapers to the keepers struck the anemometer at the top with its tail rotor and fell into the sea; both crew members died and the light was put out of action. On 3 September 1987, according to Dundee's newspaper The Courier, a fuel leak caught fire in the kitchen and spread to the upper floors; the three keepers climbed down onto the reef with the tide rising and were lifted off by a helicopter.

In October 1988, the last keepers left the tower, which from then on was monitored from Edinburgh. In 2026, the National Records of Scotland brought the construction documents to the exhibition For the Safety of All, in Edinburgh, from 3 August to 25 September. Bell Rock is still there, about 18 kilometers off the coast, shining every night: the oldest sea-washed lighthouse in the world still in service.

MYTHSWhat people say and what the record shows

• What people say

  Robert Stevenson designed and built the lighthouse on his own.

  What the record shows

  John Rennie was appointed chief engineer in 1806, with Stevenson as his assistant. Research by historian Roland Paxton, published in 2011, credits Rennie with the curve of the profile; Stevenson's 1824 book barely mentions him. The credit has been disputed ever since, and Scotland's heritage body lists Stevenson as designer and Rennie as consultant.

• What people say

  The lighthouse's base is fused to the rock of the reef.

  What the record shows

  There is no fusion. A foundation pit was cut into the reef, the first courses were laid inside it with mortar, and the stones lock together through dovetail joints, trenails and stone joggles. The rest is weight: about 2,077 tons.

• What people say

  The dovetail joint was invented for Bell Rock.

  What the record shows

  It comes from John Smeaton's Eddystone Lighthouse (1759). Stevenson himself wrote that he followed the Eddystone method.

• What people say

  The lighthouse caught fire in 1955.

  What the record shows

  In 1955, an RAF helicopter struck the top of the tower and fell into the sea, killing both crew members, according to the British Parliament's record. The fire was in 1987, according to the newspaper The Courier.

• What people say

  It is the oldest lighthouse in the world.

  What the record shows

  It is the oldest sea-washed lighthouse, built on wave-battered rock, still in service. There are far older lighthouses on dry land.

QUESTIONSFrequently asked questions

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SOURCESSources

1. Robert Stevenson, An Account of the Bell Rock Light-House, Edinburgh, 1824 (Project Gutenberg) — gutenberg.org
2. Northern Lighthouse Board, "Bell Rock" — nlb.org.uk
3. National Library of Scotland, "Robert Stevenson and the building of Bell Rock Lighthouse" — nls.uk
4. National Records of Scotland, "'A ruddy gem of changeful light': the Bell Rock Lighthouse", 2026 — nrscotland.gov.uk
5. The Rochester Bridge Trust, "John Rennie – Bell Rock Lighthouse" (based on Roland Paxton, Dynasty of Engineers, 2011) — rbt.org.uk
6. Historic Environment Scotland, Bell Rock Lighthouse, LB45197 — portal.historicenvironment.scot
7. House of Commons, "Helicopter Crash, Bell Rock Lighthouse", Hansard, 20 December 1955 — api.parliament.uk
8. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed., article "Lighthouse", 1911 — en.wikisource.org
9. The Courier, "When the Bell Rock Lighthouse fire left keepers trapped with waters rising" — thecourier.co.uk
10. Midlothian View, "Talks to shine a light on Scotland's lighthouses", 29 June 2026 — midlothianview.com

Images

• Fig. 01 — The tower and the reef exposed at low tide, in 2013. At high tide, the water covers the rock and reaches the dark base: Kognos · CC BY-SA 4.0
• Fig. 02 — The works on the reef: the tower, the timber barrack where the men lived and the bridge between the two. Engraving by William Miller after a painting by Alexander Carse, published in Stevenson's book in 1824: William Miller, sobre desenho de G. C. Scott e pintura de Alexander Carse · Public domain
• Fig. 03 — The work in September 1808, August 1809 and July 1810. Plate IX of Stevenson's book, engraved by William Miller after a drawing by J. Slight: William Miller, sobre desenho de J. Slight · Public domain
• Fig. 04 — The lighthouse in a storm, a watercolor by J. M. W. Turner from 1819, made for the engraving in Stevenson's book: J. M. W. Turner · Public domain
• Fig. 05 — The tower in 2022. The dark part at the bottom is the solid masonry the tide covers: Ralph Greig · CC BY-SA 2.0