Qualla: Girdle Ness Lighthouse

Girdle Ness Lighthouse: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Reading Tom from Reading, UK, CC BY 2.0. The Oscar went ashore in a storm in April 1813. She was a whaler returning to Aberdeen, and she ran aground in Greyhope Bay just south of the harbour mouth, where the tide and the rocks did the rest. Forty-four men were on board. Two survived. The disaster was not, strictly speaking, the fault of any missing lighthouse - the crew were drunk and incapable, the chroniclers noted with Scottish bluntness - but it left Aberdeen with no doubt that a light was needed on the Girdle Ness headland. Twenty years later, in October 1833, Robert Stevenson's tower was lit for the first time. The Astronomer Royal would call it the best lighthouse he had ever seen. It still flashes today, two white flashes every twenty seconds, automated since 1991 and monitored from Edinburgh, but otherwise doing exactly what it was built to do: warning ships off the rocks that killed the Oscar's crew.

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Image: Reading Tom from Reading, UK | CC BY 2.0

Girdle Ness Lighthouse: The Stevenson Family Builds Another One

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Colin Smith, CC BY-SA 2.0. Robert Stevenson designed Girdle Ness in 1832-33, with James Gibb as principal contractor and Alexander Slight as resident inspector. Stevenson's son Alan, who would later design the magnificent Skerryvore off the west coast, served as resident engineer. The Stevensons were the d...

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Image: Colin Smith | CC BY-SA 2.0

Girdle Ness Lighthouse: What Was Lit, and How It Changed

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lyn Mcleod, CC BY-SA 2.0. The 1833 lantern burned sperm oil - high-quality whale oil that produced a clean, bright flame - in eighteen Argand burners arranged at the focus of a 21-inch silvered-copper parabolic reflector. The light was fixed, not flashing, and remarkably for a single station it operated a...

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Image: Lyn Mcleod | CC BY-SA 2.0

Girdle Ness Lighthouse: The Best Lighthouse I Have Seen

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Russ Hamer, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1860 George Airy, the Astronomer Royal, visited Girdle Ness as part of a Royal Commission inspection. Airy was a careful, technical man, not given to easy compliments. He had reviewed lighthouses across Britain and Ireland, and he wrote of Girdle Ness that it was the best ligh...

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Image: Russ Hamer | CC BY-SA 3.0

Girdle Ness Lighthouse: The Torry Coo

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Colin Smith, CC BY-SA 2.0. Until 1987 a foghorn at the base of the headland sounded whenever visibility dropped below five nautical miles. Aberdonians called it the Torry Coo - Torry being the neighbourhood across the Dee, coo being Scots for cow - in playful comparison to the Turra Coo, a famously photoge...

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Image: Colin Smith | CC BY-SA 2.0