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Category: Scottish Enlightenment

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The Scots invented everything

Narrow roads, lochs, mountains, the sea, and a pint. The road from Edinburgh to Iona is beautiful no matter the season.

Sheep ambling down to the pub at Fionnphort. Photo courtesy Douglas J. Perot.
I drove from Edinburgh to Fionnphort just three years ago. This year, I relaxed as others managed logistics. At the Green Welly, one of our party purchased a CD of traditional Scottish songs. Amazing Grace was the last tune, and we all sang as we climbed the last rise to Fionnphort harbor. Single-track roads in the UK can make an atheist pray.
The subtext of this week’s trip has been, “The Scots invented everything,” which seems very nearly true. The Scottish Enlightenmentwas part of a worldwide outpouring of ideas. In Scotland, that took a particularly practical bent. Their chief aim was improvement, virtue, and practical assistance. Matters like lighthouse design were not too plebian for Scotland’s greatest thinkers.
If you head to the Hebrides, you go on a boat operated by Caledonian MacBrayne. This company has been in operation since 1851, although it had a period of government ownership from 1973-2006. As with most ferries, it’s a monopoly. A ditty around here goes:
The Earth belongs unto the Lord
And all that it contains
Except the Kyles and the Western Isles
And they are all MacBrayne’s.

Eilean Musdile light, designed by Robert Stevenson. Photo by Carol L. Douglas
Two waters intersect across a bar on the route of the Oban-to-Mull ferry. On either side, there’s a lighthouse standing atop a rock.  Eilean Musdile is the larger of these two. It stands at the mouth of Loch Linnhe and has a prehistoric standing stone as well as other ruins. Its lighthouse was built by Robert Stevenson in 1833.
The Stevensons are famous for their literary son, Robert Louis Stevenson, but they were known in their day as great lighthouse engineers. Robert Stevenson learned his trade from his stepfather Thomas Smith, an engineer with the Northern Lighthouse Board. At the tender age of 19 he was entrusted to supervise the Clyde Lighthouse construction on Little Cumbrae in the Firth of Clyde.
Bell Rock Lighthouse, 1819, watercolor and gouache on paper, JMW Turner, courtesy Scottish National Gallery
His most famous work was the Bell Rock lighthouse. Balanced on a partly-submerged reef, its construction was risky and difficult. It was done so precisely that its masonry has endured for more than 200 years. Robert Stevenson invented the flashing lights that are still used on lighthouses. He also designed and built roads, bridges and other public structures.
In 1797, Stevenson married his step-sister. Three of their sons, Alan, David, and Thomas(RLS’ father), became lighthouse engineers as well. David’s sons carried the lighthouse business into the fourth generation.
Celtic cross on Iona, under last night’s waxing moon. Photo courtesy Douglas J. Perot.
Opposite Robert Stevenson’s Eilean Musdile light is the smaller Lady’s Rock, which is submerged at high tide except for its small lighthouse. This rock has a romantic Scottish tale attached to it. Lachlan Cattenach was a Maclean of Duarton nearby Mull. He was unable to father a boy and blamed his wife, Catherine. He left her on the rock to await the incoming tide, taking care that it should look like an accident.
Lachlan duly reported her death to her brother, the Earl of Argyll. Later, the earl invited Lachlan to supper, where the scoundrel found Catherine seated next to her brother at the high table. Lachlan was allowed to leave unharmed, but was later found murdered in Edinburgh.
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The Athens of the North

Edinburgh is a glorious medieval, Enlightenment, Victorian layer cake whipped up by canny Scots.

“The Liberal Deviseth Liberal Things,” and if a man can make a few dollars in the bargain, that’s all to the better, egh?

I defy anyone to sleep in the economy class of a modern airplane. My solution to the transatlantic night flight is to grit my teeth and suffer through the next day, allowing my body to recover at night. No, said my hostess. You’ll feel far better if you rest for a few hours and then restart. With childish stubbornness, I refused.

Instead I headed to the Greyfriars Art Shop on Dundas Street to collect my canvas. There I had trouble remembering the term white spirits, which is what the rest of the world calls mineral spirits. Mercifully, I recognized the Winsor & Newton bottle. “That!” I stammered. By the time I got to my bed, I was sinking fast.

Francis Cadell’s last house on Ainslie Place preserves the open plan of the original Moray Estate townhouses. This allowed the owner a view of neo-classicism to the front and ‘wilderness’ to the back. I peered intently, but didn’t see the mantle in front of which he painted Portrait of a Lady in Black. 

Three hours later, I awoke miraculously refreshed and quite happy. The sum total of my work toward my project was to take my model into the drawing room in which I will be working and discuss clothing, lighting, and the furniture. Then we took an amble.

Edinburgh’s New Town is the largest and best-preserved example of Georgian town planning in the UK. The severity of its terraces and monuments is offset by abundant green space, now budding out in green and frothed with bluebells and hawthorns. It will be my temporary home for the next week.
The New Town (as distinct from the medieval street plans of Old Town) was started in the second half of the 18th century. It is strictly neo-classical in design, in keeping with the intellectual fashion of the moment.

A back garden along the Water of Leith.

Edinburgh was the seat of the Scottish Enlightenment. This was the distinctly Scottish version of an international outpouring of scientific and intellectual achievement. The Enlightenment as a whole affirmed the importance of human reason, and the Scottish form was practical in nature. It’s upon this that the Scottish reputation for invention and engineering is based.

Not only were Scottish achievements prized in their own right, but their principles were carried around the world, particularly to Canada and the United States. They’ve profoundly affected our material and economic culture to this day.
My own perambulations took me out through the back garden down to the Water of Leith, a small river that touches the city center at the New Town. Below me was the pump house for St. Bernard’s Well. Its name comes from the almost-certainly-spurious legend that the spring was first discovered by St. Bernard of Clairvaux, founder of the Cistercian order in the 12th century. In 1760, it was conveniently rediscovered by three members of George Heriot’s School. At the time, ‘taking the waters’ was all the rage among the well-heeled, based on the example set in Bath.

Victorian Hygieia presides over the Georgian temple and purportedly-Medieval well.

With typical Scottish practicality, a new pump room and ornate structure were designed for St. Bernard’s Well and then marketed aggressively:

This water so healthful near Edinburgh doth rise
which not only Bath but Moffat outvies.
It cleans the intestines and an appetite gives
while morbific matters it quite away drives. (Claudero, or James Wilson)

In 1884 the property was purchased by publisher William Nelson, who commissioned the statue of Hygieia and then gave the property to the city. It’s a capsule history of Edinburgh as a whole: medieval fable capped by an Enlightenment temple, with a Victorian diety overseeing it, all whipped together by a bunch of canny Scots with an eye to the main chance. Ah, what a glorious city!