Kinnaird Head Lighthouse is in Fraserburgh, a town in Aberdeenshire in northeastern Scotland. The original navigational light at Kinnaird Head was a simple lantern placed in a tower of a sixteenth century castle in 1787, installed by Thomas Smith of Edinburgh. The engineer Robert Stevenson—Thomas Smith’s son-in-law and the grandfather of the famous writer Robert Louis Stevenson—improved the lighthouse in 1822 and 1823, and there were further improvements in the early 1850s by Robert’s son, Alan Stevenson.
The old lighthouse keeper’s house and other buildings are now home to the Museum of Scottish Lighthouses. The museum tells the story of the Northern Lighthouse Board, the engineers who built the lights and the keepers who tended them.
Lynda McGuigan is the museum manager with overall responsibility for the whole site including the staff, the lighthouse, the castle, and of course the museum itself.
Michael Strachan is the collections manager and also a published historian. He is responsible for displaying and taking care of the museum’s nationally recognized lighthouse collection, and he is the author of three books including Scottish Lighthouses: An Illustrated History and Kinnaird Head Lighthouse: An Illustrated History.
Museum of Scottish Lighthouses
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 57:13 — 44.5MB) | Embed
Jeremy D’Entremont is the author of more than 20 books and hundreds of articles on lighthouses and maritime history. He is the president and historian for the American Lighthouse Foundation and founder of Friends of Portsmouth Harbor Lighthouses, and he has lectured and narrated cruises throughout the Northeast and in other regions. He is also the producer and host of the U.S. Lighthouse Society podcast, “Light Hearted.” He can be emailed at Jeremy@uslhs.org