“They sailed around the east coast lights,” writes Bella Bathurst in The Lighthouse Stevensons, her biography of three generations of the Stevenson family, who all built beacons, “up to Scapa Flow and then to Muckle Flugga.” She continued, “But Louis seemed far more interested in the scenery than he was in the lights.” The brothers each designed more than 30 lighthouses around Scotland’s coasts Robert Louis was expected to follow his family into lighthouse engineering, and this trip was part of his preliminary education. As a young man in 1869, he accompanied his father, the pioneering lighthouse engineer Thomas Stevenson, on a visit to Unst and Muckle Flugga to inspect the lighthouse that Thomas and his brother David had started building in 1854. The Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson would have been familiar with this view. It wears the colours – creamy white with a ring of pale yellow – that identifies it as a Stevenson lighthouse. Perched atop its serrated rocks, pointing upwards like a single candle stuck into a birthday cake and marking the end of the UK like an exclamation mark, is the most northerly of Scotland’s lighthouses. Encircled by gannets, the tiny isle of Muckle Flugga rises sheer out of the North Sea. From the northern tip of Unst, Shetland – the UK’s most northerly inhabited island – a dramatic view comes into sight.
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