When Peter Hill, a lackadaisical student at Dundee College of Art, answered an advert in The Scotsman seeking full-time lighthouse keepers, little did he imagine that within a month he would be living with three men he didn't know in a lighthouse on Pladda, a small remote island off the west coast of Scotland. He was 19, it was 1973 and, with his head fed by Vietnam, Zappa, Kerouac, Vonnegut, Watergate and Coronation Street, Hill was to spend the next six months working on various Scottish lighthouses, keeping with all manner of unusual and fascinating people. Within thirty years this way of life was to have disappeared entirely.