During the preceding winter months, the establishment at Hynish was reduced to about fifty persons, of whom twenty-seven were masons employed chiefly in dressing blocks for the Lighthouse, in laying the stone platform in the workyard (on which each course was adjusted previously to its being shipped for the Rock, to prevent the occurrence of mistakes which might not be easily remedied there), and in building some additional barracks, masons’ sheds and a limekiln for the summer of 1840. The quarriers and labourers formed a party of about eighteen, and were engaged in cutting blocks in the Tyree quarries, which, although unfit for the Lighthouse Tower, were very suitable for the completion of the Pier at Hynish; while nine carpenters had full occupation in making moulds for dressing the Lighthouse blocks, preparing oaken treenails to be used in the lower courses of the Lighthouse Tower, and in dressing handles for the masons’ and quarriers’ tools. In the month of April, a reinforcement of thirty-seven masons from Aberdeen arrived at Hynish; and the greater number of them were at once employed in the dressing of stones for the Tower; while a few assisted in building the dressed materials in a temporary manner on the stone platform in the workyard already mentioned. The number of masons in the workyard, during the summer months, varied considerably, according to the state of the works on the Rock, where seldom fewer than thirty men were stationed throughout the whole working season. But the dressing of the stones for the Tower proceeded with considerable vigour; and notwithstanding the inroads necessarily made upon the men’s time, by their being frequently required to assist in the landing of materials from Mull, a work for which few of the Tyree men were fit, from their awkwardness in the management of cranes and all kinds of machinery or tackling, and also by the constant detachment of a considerable number both of men and of tools for the laborious work of dressing the foundation-pit at the Rock, upwards of 20,000 cubic feet of granite had been dressed and fitted on the platform, when I left Hynish in the end of October 1840. ~Hynish Pier.~