Keepers of the Light

Whenever Robert Louis Stevenson smelled salt water, he knew he was close to the work of his ancestors. For generations, the Stevenson family had battled storms, shipwrecks and some of Scotland’s most treacherous seas to build an extraordinary network of lighthouses around its coast. Robert Louis was expected to follow them. Instead, he chose to write.

Keepers of the Light explores the sometimes uneasy boundary between art and engineering, and how one extraordinary family expressed a shared impulse to create in very different forms.

Writer James Crawford, himself descended from generations of engineers, explores the remarkable family inheritance that shaped Stevenson’s imagination, even as he struggled to escape its expectations. Travelling from Edinburgh to Scotland’s remote, sea drenched outposts, he discovers a dynasty in which engineering and artistry were often surprisingly close. These were men who worked in stone, glass and light, creating structures of extraordinary ingenuity and beauty, while some harboured artistic ambitions of their own.

Robert Louis chose a different medium. But as James traces the ships, islands, danger and adventure that would later fill Treasure Island and Kidnapped, he discovers how profoundly the world of the lighthouse engineers shaped the writer he became. The sea, the landscapes and even the tensions within the Stevenson family found their way into his imagination. And despite his literary success, Stevenson remained haunted by the thought that his books could never serve humanity as well as the lights his father and grandfather had built.

Edinburgh songwriter Louis Abbott responds to Stevenson’s story with a specially commissioned song, The Richest Form of Idling, bringing words, music, stone and sea together across the generations.

Presenter: James Crawford
Producers: Freya Hellier and Melvin Rickarby
Executive Producer: Alex Anderson
Songwriter: Louis Linklater Abbott
Contributors: Bella Bathurst, Michael Cruikshank, Euan McKercher, Donald Morrison, Dr Lynda McGuigan, Alison Metcalfe

A Tandem Production