Film cash will help Keepers unlock riddle of Flannan Isles lighthouse

A FILM about one of Scotland’s enduring mysteries, starring Gerard Butler and Peter Mullan, has won a £125,000 grant from the national arts funding body.

Keepers, which also stars rising star Connor Swindells, is now filming in Galloway and is inspired by the Flannan Isles mystery.

The movie casts a new spin on the 1900 mystery, when keepers Thomas Marshall, James Ducat and Donald MacArthur vanished from a lighthouse in parlous weather.

No sign of struggle was found in the lighthouse on Eilean Mor: only an overturned chair and one set of unused oilskins was found, suggesting one of the keepers had left without them – but the beds were unmade, the clocks stropped, the lamps clean and refilled, with the island itself severely damaged by storms.

The mystery, in which the bodies of the men were never found, has inspired many artistic productions, including a Doctor Who episode, Horror Of Fang Rock, a Genesis song, Wilfrid Wilson Gibson’s ballad Flannan Isle And The Lighthouse, an opera by the late Sir Peter Maxwell Davies.

Now the new movie has received the money from the Creative Scotland’s Production Growth Fund.

Directed by Kristoffer Nyholm, it is produced by Andy Evans, Ade Shannon and Sean Marley for Mad As Birds Films, along with Jason Seagraves, Maurice Fadida, Gerard Butler and Alan Siegel.

The producers said: “It has been a pleasure shooting in one of the most dramatic and picturesque parts of Scotland – we searched long and hard for the right landscape in which to set our story and found it here in Dumfries and Galloway.

“With the warm Scottish welcome we have received it has made for a genuinely thrilling experience.”