The year 1840 had now arrived, and the construction of the lighthouse was about to begin. Quarriers and labourers had been busily employed in cutting blocks of stone in the quarries. Carpenters were diligently engaged in making wooden moulds for each lighthouse block wherewith to gauge its exact mathematical figure. In April, a reinforcement of thirty-seven masons from Aberdeen arrived at Tyree--men expert in the difficult work of dressing granite--and, on April 30, the first visit was made to the rock. To the great joy of all, the barrack constructed in the previous season was found uninjured, though a mass of rock weighing about five tons had been detached from its bed and carried right across the foundation pit by the violence of the waves. In this barrack the architect and his party now took up their quarters, which from the frequent flooding of the apartments with water and from the heavy spray that washed the walls were anything but agreeable. "Once," says the gallant engineer,[J] "we were fourteen days without communication with the shore or the steamer, and during the greater part of that time we saw nothing but white fields of foam as far as the eye could reach; and heard nothing but the whistling of the wind and the thunder of the waves, which was at times so loud as to make it almost impossible to hear anyone speak. Such a scene, with the ruins of the former barrack not twenty yards from us, was calculated to inspire the most desponding anticipations; and I well remember the undefined sense of dread that flashed on my mind, on being awakened one night by a heavy sea which struck the barrack and made my cot swing inwards from the wall, and was immediately followed by a cry of terror from the men in the apartment above me, most of whom, startled by the _sound and the tremor_, sprang from their berths to the floor, impressed with the idea that the whole fabric had been washed into the sea." [Footnote J: Account of Skerryvore Lighthouse, by Alan Stevenson, Engineer to the Northern Lighthouse Board. Edinburgh, 1848.]