EDINBURGH - Engineers have found a bottle with a 132-year-old message deep inside the walls of a lighthouse in the south of Scotland. The bottle was found inside the Corsewall Lighthouse at the most northerly point of the Rhins of Galloway. The “once in a lifetime” find is understood to be the first message in a bottle ever discovered in a lighthouse in Scotland. Written using quill and ink, the letter dated 4 September 1892 reveals the names of three engineers who installed a new type of light in the 100ft (30m) tower.
It also has the names of the lighthouse’s three keepers. The 8in (20cm) bottle was found by Ross Russell, a Northern Lighthouse Board mechanical engineer, during an inspection. He spotted it after removing panels in a cupboard but it was well out of arm’s reach. The team retrieved it using a contraption made from a rope and a broom handle.
But they waited until retained lighthouse keeper, Barry Miller, arrived before they opened it. “My goodness am I grateful for them doing that,” he said. The bottle has an unusual convex base, meaning it cannot stand upright, and it is made of coarse glass, full of tiny air bubbles. It is thought it would have once contained oil. The bottle stopper was cork, which had expanded over time and stuck to the glass, while the wire which held it in place had rusted away. The men had to cut the top off the cork and very carefully drill the cork out. The note initially seemed too big to pull out the neck of the bottle so they devised a tool using two pieces of cable to twist it through the narrow opening. Dr Miller, 77, told BBC Scotland News his hands were shaking when he opened it. “It was so exciting, it was like meeting our colleagues from the past. It was actually like them being there,” he said. “It was like touching them. Like them being part of our team instead of just four of us being there, we were all there sharing what they had written because it was tangible and you could see the style of their handwriting. “You knew what they had done.
You knew they had hidden it in such a place it wouldn’t be found for a long, long time.”