at high-water
springs it is buried sixteen feet. As the tide goes down, the higher
reaches of the rock are seen to be clothed by _Conferva rupestris_ as by
a sward of grass; upon the more exposed edges, where the currents are
most swift and the breach of the sea heaviest, Baderlock or Henware
flourishes; and the great Tangle grows at the depth of several fathoms
with luxuriance. Before man arrived, and introduced into the silence of
the sea the smoke and clangour of a blacksmith's shop, it was a
favourite resting-place of seals. The crab and lobster haunt in the
crevices; and limpets, mussels, and the white buckie abound.

According to a tradition, a bell had been once hung upon this rock by an
abbot of Arbroath,[11] "and being taken down by a sea-pirate, a year
thereafter he perished upon the same rock, with ship and goods, in the
righteous judgment of God." From the days of the abbot and the
sea-pirate no man had set foot upon the Inchcape, save fishers from the
neighbouring coast, or perhaps--for a moment, before the surges
swallowed them--the unfortunate victims of shipwreck. The fishers
approached the rock with an extreme timidity; but their harvest appears
to have been great, and the adventure no more perilous than lucrative.
In 1800, on the occasion of my grandfather's first landing, and during
the two or three hours which the ebb-tide and the smooth water allowed
them to pass upon its shelves, his crew collected upwards of two
hundredweight of old metal: pieces of a kedge anchor and a cabin stove,
crow-bars, a hinge and lock of a door, a ship's marking-iron, a piece of
a ship's caboose, a soldier's bayonet, a cannon ball, several pieces of
money, a shoe-buckle, and the like. Such were the spoils of the Bell
Rock. But the number of vessels actually lost upon the reef was as
nothing to those that were cast away in fruitless efforts to avoid it.
Placed right in the fairway of two navigations, and one of these the
entrance to the only harbour of refuge between the Downs and the Moray
Firth, it breathed abroad along the whole coast an atmosphere of terror
and perplexity; and no ship sailed that part of the North Sea at night,
but what the ears of those on board would be strained to catch the
roaring of the seas on the Bell Rock.

From 1794 onward, the mind of my grandfather had been exercised with the
idea of a light upon this formidable danger. To build a tower on a sea
rock, eleven miles from shore, and barely unc