How Georgian Britain Built a Lighthouse on a Rock That Vanishes Under the Sea

On the morning of 2 September 1807, thirty-two men were standing on a reef in the middle of the North Sea, eleven miles off Arbroath. Their ship had drifted away. The tide was coming in. They had two small boats, with room for sixteen. They were there to build something nobody had ever built before: a stone lighthouse on a rock that vanishes beneath the sea on every tide. This is the story of the Bell Rock Lighthouse, and of the people who raised it. We start with the legend of the Inchcape Bell and Southey's famous ballad, and the real shipwrecks that made the rock so feared. Then we follow Robert Stevenson, the lamp-maker's stepson who became Scotland's great lighthouse engineer, out onto the reef: the floating light Pharos, the rum ration and the beer, the timber "beacon" where the men lived on stilts above the waves, the dovetailed granite tower assembled first in a yard at Arbroath, and a horse called Bassey who hauled every stone. On 1 February 1811 the light shone out for the first time, and it has never stopped. But who really built it? For two centuries the credit went to Stevenson alone. Using the letters, the Lighthouse Board's records and the work of historian Professor Roland Paxton, we look at the bitter feud with the chief engineer, John Rennie, the report that went missing from Stevenson's famous book, and the verdict historians reach today. Then we follow the Bell Rock through a century and a half of danger: HMS Argyll wrecked in 1915 because the lighthouse had no radio, German aircraft machine-gunning the tower in 1940 and 1941, and the winter's day in December 1955 when an RAF helicopter crashed into the lantern. Today it is still lit, the world's oldest working sea-washed lighthouse. If you enjoy the real stories of how Britain was built, and the people who built it, subscribe to Chisel Marks and turn on notifications so you don't miss the next film. And tell me in the comments: whose side are you on, Stevenson or Rennie? Were your ancestors masons at Arbroath, seamen, or keepers of the Northern Lights? Tell me their name. #BellRock #Lighthouse #ScottishHistory #RobertStevenson #BritishHistory