Most Scottish lighthouses are white. The Butt of Lewis Lighthouse is red - bare unpainted brick, the only major Scottish light not given the customary coat of whitewash, standing on a cliff at the northern tip of Lewis where the Atlantic comes ashore in its purest form. David Stevenson designed it in the 1860s, and whoever decided to leave the brick exposed gave the Hebrides one of their most photographed landmarks. The rock beneath the tower is up to three billion years old. The tower itself is barely a century and a half. The wind is older than both, and it shows no signs of slowing.
The lighthouse was designed by David Stevenson and built in the 1860s, with Thomas Stevenson cited in some sources as a co-builder. The Stevensons - Robert and his sons Alan, David and Thomas, and the generation after - were Scotland's lighthouse dynasty, responsible for nearly every major coastal light around the Scottish mainland and islands. (Robert Louis Stevenson, the novelist, was the son who quit the family business.) The Butt of Lewis tower is one of their more idiosyncratic projects: red brick, unpainted, blunt-shouldered, set on a low cliff at the north end of the island. There is no village around it. There is barely a road. There is just the brick, the lantern, and the sea.
The Butt of Lewis was one of the last manned lighthouses in Scotland. Its automation came in 1998, near the very end of the Northern Lighthouse Board's long programme of removing resident keepers from every station. For most of the lighthouse's working life - over 130 years - keepers and their families lived in the accommodation block, watching the lantern through the night and the Atlantic by day. A modern differential GPS base station now sits on a nearby hill to supplement the optical signal, on the same ground where a Lloyd's Signal Station operated from the 1890s, reporting passing shipping by signal flag long before radio made the job obsolete.
The cliffs the lighthouse stands on are made of Lewisian gneiss - some of the oldest rock anywhere in Europe, with components dated to the Precambrian, up to three billion years old. The Earth was barely two-thirds of its present age when this rock first formed. Glaciers have polished it; the Atlantic has hammered it; and at low tide along the coast it shows the banded, folded structure that gneiss does best. Following the cliffs southwest from the lighthouse, you reach a natural arch in the gneiss called the Eye of the Butt - a slot worn through a headland by sea and time. The best viewpoint is from Habost machair, the sandy grassland just inland that gives a perfect angle through the rock.
The road to the lighthouse passes a sheltered cove called Port Stoth, used historically for small boats. Along the coast around it, the ridges and furrows of old agricultural lazy beds - feannagan - are still visible, the marks of a centuries-long tradition of cultivating thin Hebridean soil by piling it into raised strips for potatoes, oats and barley. The lazy beds tell the same story the lighthouse does, from the other direction: people lived here, worked hard ground, depended on the sea, and kept a light burning at the end of the island because the alternative was wrecks.
Butt of Lewis Lighthouse is at 58.52°N, 6.26°W on the northernmost cliffs of the Isle of Lewis. From 2,000-4,000 feet AGL the unpainted red-brick tower is a distinctive contrast to the white lighthouses elsewhere; it marks the boundary between The Minch (south) and the open Atlantic (north). Stornoway airport (EGPO) lies about 25nm SSE, the practical nearest aerodrome. North of the Butt is open ocean for hundreds of miles. This is also officially recorded as one of the windiest places in the United Kingdom - flight planning here should account for sustained high winds, low cloud, and the lack of nearby alternates.