Our journey to the lighthouse took much longer than I expected. We walked and walked and it came no closer. As we walked we spoke of trifles. I watched while waves washed the past from the timeless rocky finger out of which the striped monolith rose.

I stopped to catch my breath by the lighthouse’s door. Even from there, the root, the views across its realm were epic in proportion.

‘Quite something, isn’t it?’ whispered Neville. ‘Wait until you get to the top. This is the tallest lighthouse in the whole continent. And ancient: the Sound has always been strategically vital. Defence and trade, going back a thousand years or more. These rocks could tell you a thing or two if they were in any position to remember. There are no records in existence that don’t mention a lighthouse on this very spot.’

On a day such as it was, I could quite clearly make out the mainland from my vantage point, but the memory of my crossing was still fresh. Then, the lighthouse had appeared only once the clouds had spread, and I could easily imagine, or so I thought, the scene during a Winter storm. North and south, though, under a clear autumn sun, the Sound was exposed in all its glory. A few behemoths lumbered past the northern end where the ocean had spread out to its full unfathomable span, their destinations far enough away to be irrelevant, their cargoes foreign and strange. To the south, I had a view past even the spot where I had emerged from the coastal bus in a previous life. My suspicions then were partially confirmed: the scene that extended south from that point was similar enough to its opposite number in the north that it would have shaken me. From the shadow of the lighthouse it seemed less threateningly constrictive, but I had become a greatly changed observer by that time. A couple of apologetic cars passed gloomily along the resentful road from left to right, neglecting even to glint in the bright sunshine. They almost made me cry.

Neville showed me through the gleaming white door. Newly-painted. We passed directly into a cavernous chamber dedicated to the worship of the sea. Not a hint of colour on the inside interfered with the panoramic view provided by the wraparound picture windows which accounted for 180 of the building’s priceless degrees. I felt as if I were still outside, except the wind’s gnawing edge had been removed.

‘Quadruple-glazed,’ he announced. ‘There’s an outer shell of thicker glass, and the two internal panes are considerably thinner. The gaps between them are the results of some pretty complex calculations, which I’m afraid I can’t really go into much detail on. Not my area of expertise.’ He seemed slightly embarrassed.

Just about the entire room was set up to drink in the views. The kitchen and dining area stood on tiptoe behind the vast expanse of concave seating, and the ever-changing constancy of the sea sat godlike in the place of a giant cinematic projection. This entertainment centre boasted just a single channel.

But for one tell-tale exception. Far over to the right of my field of vision, the glass came to an end and the tone changed. Minutely, yet undeniably, from a partial alcove came a dissenting voice. One luxurious armchair, as flawlessly white as its compatriots, faced defiantly away from the mesmerising view. A combination of wings and subtle lighting effectively hid the entire external tableau from peripheral peeks. Despite my empathy – even that vista must have its tiresome moments – it still felt like a sour-faced setup.

‘You’re frowning at my churlish corner,’ Neville said with a playful grin.

‘I’m sorry,’ I laughed. ‘I just realised the same thing. It’s such a discord.’

‘I know,’ he moved towards the staircase in the corner, inviting me to follow. ‘Of course, I love the scene out of those windows more than anything. I couldn’t live here and stay sane if I didn’t. And who wouldn’t, anyway? But there are times when the enormity threatens to become a little too much. Those times, if I’m to preserve that sanity, I retreat to the churlish corner. Sometimes I read,’ I looked around and found no reading matter, or shelves on which to store it, ‘and sometimes I just switch off. It’s amazingly effective, and just what I need. I’m as comfortable here as I could possibly be.’

The place was spotless. The bright clean balustrades leading us upstairs showed not a single sign of prior usage. I took my hand away from the railing and tried to step as lightly as possible.

‘So do you live here by yourself, then?’ I asked. He had given no indication of anybody else living there, although I knew from our earlier conversation that he had a family.

‘I do. That’s the role. It’s lighthouse keeper, not part time lighthouse keeper and part time family man. My wife comes once a week to give it a woman’s touch and make sure I’m eating properly. Some men might see it as nagging or interfering, but I’m glad of it. She’s a wonderful woman. And she’s got her hands full looking after my sons. Won’t let me rot out here, though, even during the Winter. Never missed a week in all the time I’ve been in the job, she hasn’t. And she’ll see me into my grave, that’s for sure.’

We had reached a wide landing, which turned into a kind of mezzanine. The surroundings had changed from dazzling white to the deep scarlet of a diving submarine. As a result, the air felt recycled and denser than in the bright living quarters below. Two open doorways led from the landing, one to a bedroom and one to an opulent bathroom.

‘Living downstairs, sleeping upstairs,’ he declared. ‘Not so very different from real life, is it?’ I had to agree with him, despite having recently moved into a bungalow. We rose again, this time up a thinner red spiral staircase.

The next chamber was another proposition entirely. It meant business. The red hammered metal floor gave rise to a couple of red-based swivel chairs whose white seats and backs punched virginal holes in my view of a space-age array of controls, buttons, screens and any kind of electronic mumbo-jumbo as my head emerged into the pod from the stairway. Looking around once I arrived fully on the platform, I found that the consoles took up the entire circumference of the room. Above them, a wraparound window gave a view comparable to one I had imagined once during a delirious episode.

Neville looked prouder than ever.

‘This is where it all happens,’ he told me. ‘I can spend 20 hours a day up here sometimes, in Winter. In summer it’s hardly ever more than an hour or so twice a day, checking in and keeping things ticking.’

I gaped at the machinery. ‘I’m sorry, it’s probably a stupid question, but do you actually know how all this stuff works?’

‘I ought to. I built most of it!’ he chuckled.

‘You built…. all of this?’ I gestured vacantly at the assorted gubbins.

‘Not all of it,’ he admitted. ‘Over there,’ he indicated an area behind me, facing south-west, ‘all the mechanical failsafe controls, they were created by my predecessor. They work perfectly, so there’s no need to touch them. Better than perfectly, in fact. Don’t mention it to anyone, but I test them much more often than I really need to. Besides, I like to keep at least one small part as a reminder of where we all came from. I would hope that my successor, whoever that may be, might feel the same about my work.’

This looked more like the bridge of an intergalactic starship than anything I could imagine. And it had been crafted by the hands of a man, next to whom I had been sitting, naked, scrubbing the dead skin from my heels not an hour previously. I made a couple of noises, like I was drowning.

‘It all looks very impressive, doesn’t it?’ he continued. ‘But the electronic wizardry behind it is fairly straightforward. Has to be. You don’t want to be too cutting edge with anything this important. If something happened to me, somebody else would have to take over right away. I mean, I’ve made small tweaks and improvements to pieces of kit I felt could do with it, and everything here is fully documented, but it would be irresponsible to go too left-field. I save all that for the lab down below.’

‘Quite amazing,’ I muttered. I couldn’t stop turning slowly on the spot, like the bulb high above my head.

‘Yes, I’m pleased with it,’ he said modestly. ‘Of course, it has taken me a long while. There was perfectly adequate machinery when I started. I’ve just updated things. Used advances in technology and my own ideas to improve functionality and efficiency. I studied electronic engineering at university on the mainland, took a masters, so I’m properly trained. And our library in the school is the equal of anything you’ll find anywhere else. On top of that, I know I’m doing something of vital, daily, human importance.

‘Mind you,’ he added, ‘the real work is all down to these,’ he pointed at his eyes. ‘All this gadgetry just helps to confirm and communicate what they see. There’s no substitute for simple hard graft and concentration and knowledge of that Sound down below,’ he peered downwards respectfully at the waters, which were completing their menacing two-mile run-up and taking a climactic crash against the black rocks holding up the natural platform on which we stood. I had never been keen on heights, and shivered involuntarily.

‘Come on, let’s see the pièce de resistance,’ he said as he physically led me by the shoulder to a ladder in the corner. Its lower few rungs were red, like the floor, but changed abruptly back to the brilliant white of the lower level at exactly the same time as the chairs and the exterior walls.

Eleven or twelve steps took us up through the final platform and into the lantern room. The last few rungs of the ladder, above the platform, were alive to the touch and I presumed clear glass and not plastic, to match the surrounding walls. True to form, the range and drama of the view, which had increased at each level, did not disappoint.

What initially struck me were the trance-like turbines. They had loomed over the island from every view I had known up to this point, but had always felt distant and incidental. From the top of this lighthouse, through the invisibly clear glass, they were so much more than a nagging detail. A titanic and tireless scarecrow army, the colossal container ships were shrunk dwarflike in comparison, and gave them a wide berth. Just watching the sails heave around, I became tuned in to the spiralling hum that had always been around since my arrival but which I had so easily assimilated into the background noise of life here. Now, though, I could almost see the electricity being pumped back under the seabed to the substation in the rocky bowels of the north-west escarpment. The hairs on my arms stood upright and I shuddered once more.

‘One of the most powerful sights you could hope to encounter,’ Neville clearly understood what I was going through on my first viewing. ‘Still gets me every time,’ he added. ‘Especially when you consider you’re standing under what is probably the most important application of the energy you can see being made.’ He looked upwards at the lamp. It seemed so tiny for something so powerful and life-saving.

The wind farm curled around and tapered towards the east. The matter of a few hundred metres from its end, a smaller island was connected to ours via a damp causeway. I guessed it must be what they called the North-east Rock. Neville confirmed my assumption. It was famous across the world for the nesting population of semi-nomadic seabirds that plied a long, thin east-westerly passage from continent to continent, a passage which passed close by to the northerly extremity of the island. Any self-respecting birder knew it was real, but it still felt somehow mythical even under the weight of such evidence.

Every few minutes a bird took off clumsily and wheeled around, gaining height, eagle-eyed, identifying likely sources of detritus for its winter nest, a feat of avian engineering unequalled anywhere. They could glide for miles, especially on a day like this, a perfect uplifting wind coming in from the south-east, and seemed unperturbed by the encroaching snow on the tip of the Mountain. I must have seen five or six full grown adults take off, and only one return in the time I was glued to the scene.

Closer still, back across the grazing lands, I got my first good view of the prison. The maxim was true: it did look like a mathematical, not to mention a philosophical, problem, and one telling a story of architectural progress and fashion. Unlike much of my experience elsewhere on the island, it inspired reverence rather than awe or joy. Even from the preternaturally silent interior of the lighthouse, the quietude of the correctional facility sent me into an echoless abyss. I strained my ears, hopelessly, to check for suggestions of signs of life. All I got was the sound of the air, recently disturbed by our arrival and rubbing like a hungry wheedling cat against the microscopic hairs on my ears. Neville cleared his throat, even though it was already clear.

‘Look!’ I exclaimed, and pointed. ‘Just by the school house. Can you see Penny?’ She was pottering: washing equipment, tightening bolts, touching up paintwork, keeping herself busy until the next term sprang upon her.

‘Of course. She improves any view, doesn’t she? Even this one,’ he winked at me and I turned a shade of red. Back in the school grounds she lifted her head from the physical work and rose up expectantly onto her haunches. Two small children bounded towards her and she received each one in an outstretched arm. One detached itself and ferreted around in its bag for a minute, eventually pulling out a model of some description. It looked like a ship, possibly. Penny took it in both hands like a priceless museum artefact. They spent some time all discussing its merits, the children taking a seat on the path while their teacher held forth on the various technicalities. I didn’t have to see the veneration in their eyes to know it was there.

The impromptu lesson ended, as all lessons should, in raucous laughter and what looked, from a distance, like a camp paraphrase of an Errol Flynn action scene. The owner of the model replaced it carefully in the bag and they both set out at a run towards the school gate, where a woman was waiting happily. Penny waved at her and she waved back. The children, even tinier from my vantage point, grew closer and closer to their mother, further and further from their teacher. They could have been mechanical insects, attached to a groove set into a conveyor belt that doubled as a school path. The simplest and most innocuous scene you could picture. I tried to bottle it somewhere in my memory.

Neville stood back just slightly, drawing my attention to the space he had just vacated on my left. I recognised Evie’s house immediately. The restless wind rustled her pear trees and the wooden swings swung unevenly behind. I paid closer attention. There she was, atop a set of ladders, disassembling the entire swing mechanism and its frame. She worked so quickly, I could almost feel her strong hands loosening the bolts, first with a few blows of a hammer to the butt of a red wrench, then twisting with the grace of concert violinist. The constituent parts soon lay catalogued on the grass and she flat-packed them into her stone storehouse.

While I watched, the nagging feeling grew that I ought to be helping an old lady with such a physical chore, but she looked so sprightly and in control that I felt ashamed of patronising her with the thought. She appeared from the store, dragging a large bag of charcoal along the paved path to her house. She made better progress with it than I had a few days earlier. Clearly these were the last few acts of Winter’s preparations. I wondered if it was time for our next musical date, and tried to establish what day it was. I concluded that probably it wasn’t. I would know when the time came.

She stopped on her path, straightened her back and looked straight up towards us in the lantern room, then deliberately around at the Mountain. Our eyes followed hers. Somehow the snowline had dropped dramatically since I had last checked. Was that earlier in the morning? It hadn’t snowed since then, at least not where I had been.

‘Time’s running short,’ Neville confirmed and turned to face me direct. His face was kindly, but as serious as I had seen it. On the other side of the Mountain, an agitated column of steam rose from the brewery’s main chimney. Somewhere underneath that column, the most bewitching ale in the known universe was being gestated. ‘You need to go and see old Mr Robertson, and that sidekick of his. You can’t put it off any longer,’ he said.