On the afternoon of 2 September 1807, thirty-two men were working on a reef in the North Sea when one of them looked up and saw that their ship was gone.
The reef was the Bell Rock, eleven miles off the coast of Angus. It lies right across the approach to the Firth of Tay and the Firth of Forth, and for all but two or three hours of each tide it is under as much as sixteen feet of water. Nobody knows how many ships it had taken over the centuries. In one storm in 1799, some seventy vessels were lost along that coast. In 1804 a warship of sixty-four guns, HMS York, struck it and went down with every man aboard. The engineer who would conquer it was Robert Stevenson, and his surname is shared by the dark green and blue Stevenson tartan.
The men on the rock that afternoon had come to build a lighthouse on it. Their supply vessel, the Smeaton, had been moored a little way off. She had broken loose and was drifting away to leeward, and her crew, struggling to get sail on her, could not beat back against wind and tide. On the rock there were two small boats. In calm weather they might have carried eight men each. The tide had turned.
The engineer in charge saw it before the workmen did. He was thirty-five years old and his name was Robert Stevenson.
A pool of salt water
Stevenson wrote down afterwards exactly what he did, which was nothing. He climbed to the highest point of the reef and watched the Smeaton grow smaller. He worked through the arithmetic of thirty-two men and sixteen places. He decided that when the moment came he would have everyone strip to their shirts, put as many as possible into the boats and have the rest hang on to the gunwales, and pull for the ship. He did not think it would work.
The men went on drilling and cutting. Then the sea reached the lower workings, and they gathered their tools and came up to where the boats were, and found one missing, and looked out to where the ship had been. Nobody said a word. They simply turned and looked at him.
He tried to speak and found he could not. His mouth was so dry that his tongue would not move. He bent down to one of the rock pools, scooped up a handful of sea water and wet his lips with it. When he straightened up, someone shouted: “A boat! A boat!”
It was a pilot boat out of Arbroath, coming through the haze with the day’s letters. Its skipper had no idea anything was wrong. He took off as many men as he could carry, the two boats took the others, and they all reached the ship that night, soaked and sick and silent. The next morning, when the bell rang to go back out to the rock, only eight of the workmen would get into the boats. Stevenson got in with them. By the following tide the rest had followed.
Ninety courses of stone
It took four years. In the first season they could work only when the rock was dry, a couple of hours at a time, and had to put their forge out twice a day when the sea arrived. They built a timber beacon on iron legs and then, improbably, a barracks on top of it, where the men lived through the summers with the waves passing underneath.
The tower was made of some two and a half thousand blocks of granite and sandstone, each one cut by hand in a yard at Arbroath so that it dovetailed into its neighbours like a piece of a puzzle, shipped out, and winched into place. Every one of those stones was dragged from the yard to the harbour by the same horse, whose name was Bassey. The light was first shown on the night of 1 February 1811.
It is still there. It is the oldest sea-washed lighthouse in the world, and in over two hundred years the masonry has never needed repair.
The family business
The Bell Rock made Robert Stevenson’s name, and he made a dynasty. His son Alan built Skerryvore, twelve miles out in the open Atlantic off Tiree, which many engineers consider the most beautiful lighthouse ever raised. His sons David and Thomas followed, and David’s sons after them. Between about 1790 and 1940, members of this one family designed nearly every major light on the Scottish coast: Muckle Flugga at the top of Shetland, Dubh Artach, Ardnamurchan, the Butt of Lewis and dozens more.
Thomas had one child, a thin, sickly, brilliant boy who was expected to join the firm. He spent his boyhood summers being taken round harbour works and island lights, tried engineering, tried law, and in the end told his father that he meant to be a writer. It was a bitter disappointment to the old man. The boy was Robert Louis Stevenson.
He never really left the family trade behind. The shipwreck in Kidnapped takes place on the Torran Rocks off Mull, exactly where his father and uncle had built the Dubh Artach light. Treasure Island is full of the sea. Near the end of his life, in Samoa, he began writing a history of his forebears and called it Records of a Family of Engineers. “Whenever I smell salt water,” he wrote, “I know that I am not far from one of the works of my ancestors.” Today a Stevenson who wants to wear the connection usually starts by looking for a kilt for men in the name tartan.
A tartan without a castle
Stevenson is not a clan name, and it would be false to dress it up as one. It means son of Steven. It arose on its own in a hundred Lowland parishes, and it belongs to merchants, masons, ministers and engineers, not to chiefs in glens. The Lowlands never organised themselves into clans, and for most of history Lowland families had no tartans either.
That changed from the later nineteenth century, when weavers began producing family or name tartans for the many Scots, at home and overseas, who wanted a cloth of their own. The pattern generally sold as Stevenson tartan is one of these. It is a dark, handsome design: broad blocks of mid-green and deep blue divided by black, with fine lines of red and yellow and a narrow stripe of paler blue. The registers note that it is closely related to a sett recorded under the spelling Stephenson, and probably shares a source with it. Retailers offer it made to order as kilts, skirts, waistcoats, scarves and ties, and as cloth by the yard.
The registers also hold a second design, with a note attached that is too good to leave out. In 1980 a Miss Elizabeth Littlejohn of Arlington, Virginia, drew up a tartan in dark red, green, royal blue and tan to honour a relative, Charles Stevenson, who had emigrated from Glasgow to America in 1861. The Scottish Tartans Society accepted it, in its own careful words, as “a” Stevenson but not “the” Stevenson. That is how tartans have really come into the world for the past hundred and fifty years. Somebody cares enough about a family’s story to design one, a mill weaves it, and the record keepers write it down.
Seattle, four weeks before a wedding
Here is another Stevenson, an invented one, though you may know somebody like him.
Mark Stevenson is forty-one and a structural engineer in Seattle. He designs the steel that holds up hospitals. His younger sister is getting married in October, her fiancé’s family are Scots from Ontario, and the men of the wedding party have agreed to wear kilts. Mark has been told to sort himself out.
He approaches it like an engineer, which is to say he reads everything. He had assumed a kilt was a kilt. It turns out that what a well-stocked specialist sells under the heading of a kilt for men covers at least five different garments, in traditional tartan, cotton utility, leather, denim and hybrid cuts, all of them sharing one structure: a flat apron in front, pleats behind.
The traditional kilt is eight or nine yards of tartan, deeply pleated, stitched down from waist to hip, worn high at the navel with a sporran and hose. That is the one for a wedding. The casual version is about five yards, with shallower pleats, lighter, cooler, cheaper, the thing to wear to a Highland games. The utility kilt is heavy cotton with cargo pockets and snaps, pure workwear. The hybrid puts tartan pleats into a plain cotton body. Denim and leather are exactly what they sound like.
He admires the load path. All that cloth at the back is what makes the garment swing, and the weight of it is what keeps the front hanging flat. It is a nice piece of design, and it is three hundred years old.
He orders the traditional one, in the green and blue family sett, because it is a wedding. He sends three measurements and is pleased that the maker asks for exactly three and works to the customer’s own waist, hip and length. Waist, taken at the navel and not at the belt line, which comes out three inches bigger than his jeans. Hips at the widest. Length from waist to mid-kneecap, which he finds by kneeling on the floor with his back straight while his wife measures to the carpet. He chooses pleating to the sett, so the pattern runs unbroken round the back. He picks navy hose and red flashes to bring out the fine line in the cloth, and a plain black sporran.
When it arrives he tries it on and walks the length of the hall and back, to see it move. His eight-year-old asks what the pattern means.
“It means our name,” he says. “There was a man called Stevenson who built a lighthouse on a rock in the sea that everyone said was impossible. One day the tide came in and the boat had gone, and he was so scared he couldn’t talk.”
“What did he do?”
“He went back the next morning.”
Still lit
The Stevensons have no motto, no war cry and no ruined keep. What they have is a ring of lights from Shetland to the Solway that have come on at dusk every night for two centuries, a shelf of books that children are still reading, and a dark green and blue tartan that pretends to be nothing it is not. They were not chiefs, and their tartan has no old legend behind it. It is a good cloth to stand up in at a sister’s wedding all the same, for the descendants of people who built things that lasted.
