The Flannan Isles Lighthouse: Three Keepers Who Walked Into the Wind and Never Returned
Twenty miles west of the Isle of Lewis, out where the Atlantic stops being a sea and becomes an appetite, there is a cluster of green rocks the old Hebrideans called the Seven Hunters. On the largest of them, Eilean Mòr, a white tower stands against a sky that is almost never still. It was there, in the last days of December 1900, that three men vanished so completely that not a bone, not a boot, not a single certain answer was ever recovered. The lighthouse still turns its light over the water. The men who tended it walked out one afternoon into the wind and were simply gone. A Light on the Edge of the World The Flannan Isles lighthouse was young when the mystery began. Designed by David Alan Stevenson — of the same restless engineering family that gave Scotland both its great lights and the novelist Robert Louis Stevenson — it had shone for barely a year, first lit in December 1899. Building it had been a labor bordering on the heroic. Every stone, every barrel of oil, every lengt...