An oily smell filled the circular light room where a series of complicated clockwork mechanisms stood.

Inside this darkened tower room, a steep iron ladder led to an upper section where the light was carefully positioned.

The smells and sights of Scottish lighthouses and the childhood memories it evoked never left Martha Robertson.

Martha jotted her stories onto paper on her 70th year, and now her son Jim is dedicated to keeping her insight into this now redundant role alive in her memory as he continues to share snippets of this life through his late mother's tales.

Life as the daughter of a lighthouse keeper

The Arbroath family's connection with lighthouses can be traced back to Jim's great grandfather, a lighthouse keeper who worked in places such as the Isle of May and Davaar Island at the mouth of Campbeltown Loch.

It was a profession Martha's father, Jimmy Petrie, decided to follow with his first posting on the island of Inchkeith in November 1920.

Here, Martha would spend the first five years of her life as the only child on the island before her sister Jean was born.

"She didn't realise at time she was being deprived of something precious and essential to her well-being which was playmates," Jim says.

"She remembers being taken up the light tower by her father and she talks of the three men who would normally keep watch on the light."

At each lighthouse, a team of three would keep watch between sunset and sunrise each day before carrying out maintenance work in the mornings. Two of the keepers would then be granted a sleep in the afternoon while the third took on the daylight watch.

'A dangerous job'

It was a difficult job which was not without its dangers, with Jimmy even coming close to death when he became ill with double pneumonia.

"In those days, it was difficult to get people off the rock," Jim says. "They actually had to put up a sign and hope that somebody would see it, saying 'Dr needed'.

"Normally, a small boat would be going up and down and they had to judge it right and jump onto the pier or rock. So it was a very dangerous job.

"When my grandfather was ill, thankfully it was a calm day - but they still had to take him off by stretcher."

A family on the move

While the life of a lighthouse keeper brought its hardships, Jim says his late mother's recollection of her childhood was mostly a happy one and she often noted how she cherished the time she spent with her father was when he was not working long shifts at the lighthouse.

The family did, however, have to move from one remote spot to the next depending on where lighthouse keeper Jimmy was based.

From Loch Ryan Lighthouse at Cairnryan Point to Hoy High lighthouse in Orkney and the Rhinns of Islay Lighthouse on the Isle of Orsay, Martha recalls jumping from large city schools in Glasgow, if there was nowhere suitable accommodation for the family to live, to small rural classrooms in places like the Island of Erraid.

"In Erraid, they [the children of the lighthouse keepers] had their own school teacher so that became quite a little community for them there," Jim says.

"My mum also had to go to her granny's in Glasgow and do some schooling there. That was part of the problem, the keepers wives sometimes had to miss their families."

Passing on the family's lighthouse legacy

Martha handwritten memories were later collated into a book called A Quiet Life, a story she was motivated to write for the future generations of her family to enjoy.

Having sold copies in places as far away as Tasmania, Jim says the book is in fact more of a social history and offers a look into the life of a profession which became redundant to automation.

Scotland's last manned lighthouse became automated in 1998 and, today, several lighthouses are used as holiday lets and visitor attractions.

Working in a library, Jim, 62, has always been surprised at how well his mother's book is received by those reading it and the interest people have in the roles lighthouse keeper played.

This has spurred him to recently take on his first talk about the interesting life she lived and continue his research into his family's ties with this historic trade, visiting as many of the lighthouses around Scotland where they were based.

He loves the way his mother detailed events such as the family's flitting to Orkney and her stoic attitude to this unusual life on the move, saying that his mother could always sum it up better in her own words.

"The lighthouse was perched on a diminutive cliff, behind it the green expanse of a treeless island with only a few scattered houses," Martha wrote in her book.

"The keepers were already waving handkerchiefs in greeting, before they prepared for our arrival."

She added: "Jean and I were too tired to pay much attention to the house we had left at Cairnryan. My mother and father soon rolled up their sleeves and made the house a home with all our own bits and pieces."