Archaeology Notes

Event ID 675030

Category Descriptive Accounts

Type Archaeology Notes

Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/675030

NM73NE 5.00 77812 35105

Lighthouse (flashing white) [NAT]

OS (GIS) AIB, April 2008.

NM73NE 5.01 NM 77821 35121 North Keeper's House

NM73NE 5.02 NM 77832 35111 South Keeper's House

NM73NE 5.03 NM 77882 35229 Northern Slipway

NM73NE 5.04 NM 77879 35092 Southern Slipway

For standing stone (apparently destroyed or removed during lighthouse construction), see NM73NE 4.

ARCHITECT: Robert Stevenson 1833

Restoration of south keeper's cottage by Shauna Cameron 1999-2000.

EXTERNAL REFERENCE

Scottish Records Office

The Commissioners announce their intention to build 3 new lighthouses, Dunnet Head, Barra Head and S. Side of Lismore. Letter to C. Cunningham says the commissioners have resolved to delay decision on Chickenhead

(Stornoway)

1829 GD46/17/77

(Undated) information in NMRS.

(Location cited as NM 778 351). Lighthouse, Eilean Musdile, erected 1833, engineer Robert Stevenson. A tapering circular tower, with cast-iron square-paned lantern and corbelled walk-way with cast-iron lattice railing. The tower rises from a semicircular base.

The single-storey range of keepers' houses, now disused, is in a simplified form of the flat-roofed 'Egyptian' style.

The gorge that bisects the small island is spanned by a nicely finished rubble segmental arch.

J R Hume 1977.

This tower lighthouse is situated at the SW end of Eilean Musdile, a projection to the SW of the island of Lismore, from where it guards and defines the ESE entrance into the Sound of Mull. It was established in 1833, being built by Robert Stevenson with James Smith of Inverness as the contractor. It was left (after 1910) as one of the two remaining purely catoptric lights in NLB service, being automated (as a major automatic light) in 1965.

Information from RCAHMS (RJCM), 29 April 2008.

R W Munro 1979.