Northern Lights

The Bell Rock Lighthouse was built by the famous Stevenson engineers off the coast of Angus, Scotland in 1811. To celebrate its bicentenary is this fully illustrated books, which tells the story of Scotland's lighthouses through narrative, objects, charts and photographs. It uses National Museums Scotland's pre-eminent collection of sea-marking material from the Northern Lighthouse Board and also from the Stevenson family. For reasons explained in the book, historic items relating to the building of the earlier Eddystone Lighthouse, located in the English Channel, are also held by the Museum, and John Smeaton's stone-built construction there must be seen as the inspiration for Robert Stevenson's structure on the Bell Rock. A paperback edition (978 1 905267 47 7, GBP17.99) is also available.