88 , PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY CF THE SEA. 



busily employed in cutting blocks of stone in the quarries. 

 Carpenters were diligently engaged in making wooden moulds 

 for each lighthouse block wherewith to guage its exact mathe- 

 matical figure. In April, a reinforcement of thirty-seven masons 

 from Aberdeen arrived at Tyree — men expert in the difficult 

 work of dressing granite — and, on April 30, the first visit was 

 made to the rock. To the great joy of all, the barrack con- 

 structed in the previous season was found uninjured, though a 

 mass of rock weighing about five tons had been detached from 

 its bed and carried right across the foundation pit by the 

 violence of the waves. In this barrack the architect and his 

 party now took up their quarters, which from the frequent flood- 

 ing of the apartments with water and from the heavy spray that 

 washed the walls were anything but agreeable. " Once," says the 

 gallant engineer,* " we were fourteen days without communica- 

 tion with the shore or the steamer, and during the greater part 

 of that time we saw nothing but white fields of foam as far as 

 the eye could reach, and heard nothing but the whistling of the 

 wind and the thunder of the waves, which was at times so loud as 

 to make italmost impossible to hear anyone speak. Such a scene, 

 with the ruins of the former barrack not twenty yards from us, 

 was calculated to inspire the most desponding anticipations ; and 

 I well remember the undefined sense of dread that flashed on my 

 mind, on being awakened one night by a heavy sea which struck 

 the barrack and made my cot swing inwards from the wall, and 

 was immediately followed by a cry of terror from the men in the 

 apartment above me, most of whom, startled by the sound and 

 the tremor, sprang from their berths to the floor, impressed with 

 the idea that the whole fabric had been washed into the sea." 



This spell of bad weather, though in summer, well-nigh out- 

 lasted their provisions ; and when at length they were able to 

 make the signal that a landing would be practicable, scarcely 

 twenty-four hours' stock remained on the rock. The landing of 

 the heavy stones from the fighters was a work of no small dif- 

 ficulty, considering the slippery nature of the rock, and as the 

 loss of one dressed stone would frequently have delayed the 

 whole progress of the building, the anxiety was incessant. On 

 July 4, the building of the tower really commenced. Six courses 



* Account of Skerryvore Lighthouse, by Alan Stevenson, Engineer to the 

 Northern Lighthouse Board. Edinburgh, 1848. 



