General
Engineers Discover a 132-Year-Old Message in a Bottle in a Scottish Lighthouse
Mechanical engineers inspecting a lighthouse found a surprising message: a handwritten missive from workers of another age.
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.