At Arbroath suitable buildings are erected for the light-keepers' families, with each a piece of enclosed ground, and a seat in the parish-church. Connected with these buildings are store-houses, a room for the master and crew of the attending vessels, and a signal-tower fifty feet high, at the top of which is a small observatory furnished with an excellent achromatic telescope, a flag-staff, and a copper signal-ball measuring eighteen feet in diameter. By means of this and a corresponding ball at the lighthouse, daily signals are kept up to signify when _all is well_. Should the ball at the rock be allowed to remain down, as is the case when anything is particularly wanted, or in the event of sickness, the tender immediately puts out to sea.
The expense of this great national undertaking, together with the buildings at Arbroath, the attending vessel, and the first year's stores, amounted to about sixty-one thousand three hundred and fifty pounds.
We cannot close this notice of the Bell Rock lighthouse without recording a curious accident which occurred on the night of the 9th February, 1832, about 10 o'clock. A large-herring gull struck one of the south-eastern mullions of the light-room with such force, that two of the polished plates of glass measuring about two feet square and a quarter of an inch thick, were shivered to pieces, and scattered over the floor, to the great alarm of the keeper on watch, and the other two inmates, who rushed instantly into the light-room. It happened fortunately, that although one of the red shaded sides of the reflector-frame was passing in its revolution at the moment, the pieces of broken glass were so minute, that no injury was done to the valuable red glass. The gull was found to measure five feet between the tips of the wings. In its gullet was found a large herring, and in its throat a piece of plate-glass about an inch in length.
While the Bell-Rock lighthouse was in progress, Mr. Stevenson was often struck with the frequent and distressing occurrence of shipwrecks at the Carr Rock. The Carr forms the seaward termination of a reef of sunken rocks which appear at low water, extending about a mile and three quarters from the shore of Fifeness, on the northern side of the entrance of the Frith of Forth. The very dangerous position of this rock, as a _turning point_ in the navigation of the northern-bound shipping of the Frith, required that this rock, in connection with the several lighthouses of the Bell Rock, Isle of May, and Inchkeith, should be made as easily distinguishable to the mariner as possible. In the course of nine years no fewer than sixteen vessels had been either lost or stranded on the Carr Rocks. Therefore, in 1809, moorings were laid down for a floating buoy, 'but owing to the heavy swell of sea and the rocky sand-stone bottom on this part of the coast, it was found hardly possible to prevent the buoy from occasionally drifting, even although it had been attached to part of the great chain made from bar-iron an inch and a half square, with which the Bell-Rock floating-light had been moored for upwards of four years without injury. The moorings of the Carr Rock buoy, from the continual rubbing upon the sand-stone bottom, were worn through with the friction in the course of ten months; and during the four years which it rode here, though regularly examined and replaced in the proper season of the year, it was no less than five times adrift, to the great inconvenience and hazard of shipping.'