After two centuries of faithfully guiding sailors around a blustery headland in southwest Scotland, the lighthouse needed some attention.
Ross Russell, a mechanical engineer, was helping refurbish the Corsewall Lighthouse in the village of Kirkcolm when he peeked into the cavity in a wall of the old structure. That’s when he saw it: an old glass bottle with something curled up inside.
He and his colleagues fished the bottle out of its hiding place, called the lighthouse keeper and congregated at the bottom of the structure to inspect their discovery. Inside the bottle, which was stoppered with rusted wire wrapped around an old cork, was a note handwritten in cursive.
How old, exactly, became clear when they drilled away the cork and pulled the note through the bottleneck using two cables. The date on the header: Sept. 4, 1892.
“We were shaking, especially me,” said Barry Miller, the lighthouse keeper for Corsewall Lighthouse who raced over last month when the workers told him what they had found. “I couldn’t keep my hands still, and I read the note out to the other guys.”
Was it a love letter, a disgruntled complaint or someone’s final goodbye? “We all swore ourselves to silence if it was a treasure map,” he joked.
If not as lucrative as a treasure map, the note turned out to be more relevant to their work, at least: It was a 132-year-old missive, written in ink, from former engineers and lighthouse keepers who were installing a new Fresnel lens and lantern at the top of the tower.
“By great coincidence, we were working on the very lens which they had installed,” Miller said, adding, “It was a direct communication from them to us.”
When the note was written, Queen Victoria was Britain’s monarch and U.S. President Grover Cleveland would soon return for a second term. Russell, 36, said the bottled message gave him a sense of being connected to the past: “It almost sent shivers up your spine, because you knew that what he was reading out had been written 132 years ago.”
“To find a bottle and a note on the beach would be incredible enough, never mind in the wall of a lighthouse,” he said, calling it a “right-good time capsule.”
Perhaps the note was intended for future workers, hidden as it was in the walls behind a cupboard. The crew had dismantled the cupboard only to check some beams, part of an inspection of the heavy lens. “We could have easily missed it,” Russell said.
The installation of the new Fresnel lens in 1892 would have been a massive project, he added, wondering if the crew had written the note simply to record their pride.
Ages later, some of their descendants have been able to share that pride and grasp another piece of their family history as word has spread about the note, according to reporting by BBC Scotland.
“The best part of it for me was getting that history and getting these connections the note had with people who are local to the area,” Russell said.
The Corsewall Lighthouse is one of more than 200 still operated and maintained by the Northern Lighthouse Board, which employs engineers, technicians and lighthouse keepers, across Scotland and the Isle of Man, according to its website.
For Miller, a former academic who has looked after lighthouses in southwest Scotland for 20 years, the protection they offer passing vessels endures time, even as technology has advanced to include radio and satellite navigation. “The lighthouses remain absolutely essential to coastal navigation,” he said, adding that they are a visual aid that helps vessels avoid reefs, sand banks and other dangers.
The note and the bottle are being stored in Edinburgh, at the board’s offices. But it’s a temporary home. Once the refurbishment is complete, the group said, the note and bottle will be returned to the hiding place in Corsewall Lighthouse where it had sat for more than 130 years.
Beside it will be one addition: another bottle, this time with a note from the engineers and keepers from this age describing their work and signing their names.
“Sometime in the future, perhaps, we will be able to communicate to someone else,” Miller said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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