The logbook on Muckle Skerry begins in 1813, in a hand so careful it looks engraved. Wind north-west, fresh. Lamp lit at 4.12. Two vessels passed to the east. For two hundred and twelve years the entries barely change, and that, says Agnes Morrow, is the point. “Nothing happening is what success looks like out here,” she tells me, pouring tea from a pot older than both of us.
Morrow is fifty-eight and has spent thirty-one winters on the rock. Her father kept the light before her, and his mother before him. In March a team from the mainland fitted a solar array and a sealed LED lantern that will run, they promise, for twenty years without a human hand. Her job, as of this autumn, no longer exists.
A grammar of weather
What the keepers know is hard to write down. They read the sea the way a musician reads a score: the sound of a swell changing key before a gale, the colour of the horizon an hour before fog. Morrow has started a second logbook, not of what happened but of how she knew it would.
“Nothing happening is what success looks like out here. You only notice a lighthouse on the night it fails.”
Agnes Morrow, keeper
On the neighbouring tower at Hesta Ness, Callum and Brigid Fair are doing the same. Their notes are already four hundred pages long and include a taxonomy of mist that a meteorologist in Bergen has asked to publish. “We are not sentimental about the job,” Brigid says. “We are sentimental about the knowledge.”
By the time the supply boat comes to take me back, the wind has turned. Morrow glances at the water, then at the sky, then writes a single line in the new book. I ask what it says. She smiles and closes the cover. Continue reading →