Qualla: Bass Rock Lighthouse

Bass Rock Lighthouse: Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Karora, Public domain. To build a lighthouse on the Bass Rock, David Stevenson had to take a castle apart. The 13th-century keep, the governor's house, several other castle buildings: down they came, stone by stone, and back up they went in 1902 as the tower and quarters of a new light station. Recycling, Edwardian style. The Stevensons, dynasty of engineers and Robert Louis Stevenson's family, had been studding Scotland's coast with lights for three generations. The Bass would be one of David's last major commissions, and he laid it across the bones of a fortress that had once held kings, hermits, prisoners, and three hundred million years of phonolitic trachyte.

Read more: Bass Rock Lighthouse on Qualla

Image: Karora | Public domain

Bass Rock Lighthouse: The Decision

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lisa Jarvis, CC BY-SA 2.0. In July 1897, the commissioners of the Northern Lighthouse Board decided that the Firth of Forth needed two new lights: one at Barns Ness, near Dunbar on the mainland, and one out on the Bass. The Bass had loomed as an unlit hazard for centuries. Ships entering the Forth had to t...

Read more: Bass Rock Lighthouse on Qualla

Image: Lisa Jarvis | CC BY-SA 2.0

Bass Rock Lighthouse: Stevenson's Tower

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ad Meskens, CC BY-SA 3.0. David Alan Stevenson (1854 to 1938) belonged to the third generation of the lighthouse-engineering dynasty founded by his grandfather Robert Stevenson, who had also built the original Isle of May lighthouse in 1816. Robert Louis Stevenson was his cousin, the literary defector who...

Read more: Bass Rock Lighthouse on Qualla

Image: Ad Meskens | CC BY-SA 3.0

Bass Rock Lighthouse: Life on the Rock

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ellievking1, CC BY-SA 4.0. The keepers had the gannets for company. More than 150,000 northern gannets nest on the Bass each summer in the world's largest colony of the species, and their droppings produce 152 tonnes of ammonia a year, equivalent, by one calculation, to ten million chickens. The smell is p...

Read more: Bass Rock Lighthouse on Qualla

Image: Ellievking1 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Bass Rock Lighthouse: Visiting From a Distance

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ben Clarke, CC BY-SA 4.0. You cannot land at the lighthouse without permission from the owner, Hew Hamilton-Dalrymple, whose family has held the Bass since 1706. Boats from the Scottish Seabird Centre in North Berwick circle the rock through the season, weather permitting, and a smaller number land at the...

Read more: Bass Rock Lighthouse on Qualla

Image: Ben Clarke | CC BY-SA 4.0