Engineers refurbishing a historic lighthouse in Scotland were blown away after discovering a 132-year-old message in a bottle — and it had a surprising connection to their project. Ross Russell and his team had been renovating the Corsewall Lighthouse in Kirkcolm when they uncovered the bottle in a wall cavity in the lighthouse, which was built back in 1817. The building technicians showed the letter to lighthouse keeper Barry Miller, who subsequently read it aloud to the team assembled for the renovation project. Initially joking that the parchment was a treasure map, Miller was shocked after realizing that it was a missive penned in quill ink in 1892 by the engineers and lighthouse keepers at the time. They had been outfitting the top of the lighthouse with a new lens — the very same part their present-day counterparts had been working on. The note, dated September 1892 read: “This lantern was erected by James Wells Engineer, John Westwood Millwright, James Brodie Engineer, and David Scott Laborer, of the firm of James Milne & Son Engineers, Milton House Works, Edinburgh, during the months from May to September and relighted on Thursday night 15th Sept. 1892.” The crew had written the correspondence after finishing the daunting project, which took all summer to complete. They then stuffed the rolled-up directive in an old glass bottle with a cork and hid it in the wall cavity of the lighthouse, where it remained undiscovered until now. The Corsewall crew plans to pass the proverbial torch by stashing another message in a bottle in the same hole in the wall. “Sometime in the future, perhaps, we will be able to communicate to someone else,” said Miller.
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| James Wells, John Westwood, James Brodie, and David Scott |
