The Flannan Isles Lighthouse

The Flannan Isles lie about 20 miles west of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. On the largest, Eilean Mòr, the Northern Lighthouse Board built a lighthouse that was first lit on 7 December 1899. It was run by a rotating team of four men: three on the island at any time, with the fourth ashore on Lewis.

Life there meant cliffs, wind and isolation. Supplies and relief keepers came by the board's tender, Hesperus, which had to land men at one of two landings, east or west, depending on the sea.

On 15 December 1900, the steamer Archtor, bound from Philadelphia to Leith, passed the islands in poor weather and noted that the light was not burning. The report reached the board when the ship docked at Leith on 18 December.

The Hesperus was due to sail for the scheduled relief on 20 December but was held in port by bad weather. It did not reach Eilean Mòr until about noon on 26 December.

Nobody came down to meet the boat. There was no flag on the flagstaff, and the usual empty provision boxes had not been left on the landing for refilling. The relief keeper, Joseph Moore, climbed to the station alone.

The entrance gate and the main door were both closed. Inside, the beds were unmade and the clock had stopped. The lamps had been cleaned and refilled, ready to be lit, and the kitchen was tidy. One set of oilskins still hung in the station, which suggested that one man had gone out without his waterproofs. Moore and the Hesperus crew searched the island. They found no one.

Superintendent Robert Muirhead arrived on 29 December. At the west landing he found storm damage far above the normal reach of the sea. A box holding mooring and landing ropes, normally kept in a crevice about 110 feet above sea level, had been torn out and its contents scattered. Iron railings were bent, part of the landing's rail track was wrenched from its concrete, and a rock weighing more than a ton had been moved. Turf had been torn away more than 200 feet up.

In his report of 8 January 1901 Muirhead concluded that the men had probably gone down on the afternoon of 15 December to secure the rope box, and had been swept away by an unusually large sea.

Within a few years the disappearance became folklore. Wilfrid Wilson Gibson's 1912 poem Flannan Isle added an overturned chair and an untouched meal that are not in the official record. Later retellings went further, quoting the keepers' own logbook in their final days.

The light was automated on 28 September 1971. It still operates without keepers.