#moray firth

Common bottlenose dolphin Tursiops truncatus

On January 21st 1940 HMS Exmouth was sunk by a U-Boat in the Moray Firth with the loss of 189 lives.

The Exmouth sank with the loss of all its crew as it was escorting the Cyprian Prince, a merchant vessel loaded with supplies for building wartime defences, from Aberdeen to Scapa Flow on 21 January, 1940.

The bodies of 15 crew members were washed ashore a week later.

They were buried at a mass grave in Wick, but they were not individually identified.

The Exmouth wreck was not discovered until 2001, one of the divers described it as “an underwater garden of stunning beauty, covered with bright hydroids, anemones and starfish.” and that he have never seen so much sea life on any other wreck in the world, he went on “"It is most fitting that the site has been transformed from one of death and destruction to a scene of tranquility and life.”

The diving team discovered that the ship had been “blown apart” by the impact of the torpedo and that it was obvious from the survey the destroyer sank immediately.

“Large quantities of live munitions were strewn over the vessel.”

A plaque of remembrance was placed on the wreck in memory of those who died when the vessel went down.

All is good heading back slowly from Inverness…

'The Burghead Bull' Pictish Symbol, Inverness Museum and Gallery, Scotland.

MOST people relish a bit of mystery and intrigue when they get out and about, and there’s god’s amount of that throughout Scotland.

Prepare to be more than fascinated if ever you steg it along the coast around Nairn and Findhorn in the north-east of Scotland. It’s a ridiculously beautiful Site of Special Scientific Interest that takes in Culbin Forest, Culbin Sands and Findhorn Bay.

Walk along Culbin Sands, Bar Inbhir Èireann, and you’ll get that frisson that always comes when you find somewhere special. Have you visited Gran Canaria? Welcome to a mini-Maspalomas once called Britain’s desert.

Beneath your feet there was a thriving community. Neither Pompeii nor Atlantis, but there was a village that vanished from history. A barony buried forever.

In 1694 a natural disaster engulfed five square miles of fertile land, taking with it farms, dovecots, houses, a mansion and orchards.

Farmers threw down their implements and fled. They abandoned their fields to nature as a freak westerly sandstorm blew in on an autumn gale during the harvest.

Within days everything was gone, and the course of the River Findhorn altered.

In his History of Moray and Nairn (1897) Charles Rampini, Sheriff-Substitute, wrote: “The sand is of such extreme lightness and fineness that the merest breath of wind sets it moving. A slight breeze raises the whole surface into a whirling tempest of sand. The result is that the aspect of the scene is continually changing.

"A night’s gale may level a sandhill 100 feet high or convert a ravine with precipitous sides into a monotonous plain.”

According to Rampini the sands were so labile that in his day they were still talking about the smugglers who stashed a hoard of contraband but couldn’t find it the following day. It hasn’t been found yet!

For a long time after the big storm things would emerge. Parts of the mansion house (from which locals stole stone for their houses) and the uppermost branches of trees from the buried orchards (which strangely yielded good fruit ).

A chimney would poke up out of the sand now and then, and a wag would shout down it only to run away at some ghostly retort (his echo or a bogle).

“An old man who died about 50 years ago at the age of 80 used to relate that in his younger years he had seen an apple tree appearing above the waste,” Rampini wrote.

“Once it budded and blossomed and finally bore fruit.

“Now the only vestiges of the estate are the sandy furrows, which on the level spaces among the sandhills still show the rigs formed by the heavy oxen-drawn plough of former days.”

People always look for a reason for the cataclysm that took Culbin. Biblical retributions, curses. Clergymen were quick to blame the laird, Alexander Kinnaird, for playing cards with the devil on a Sunday. Or a witch who’d been strangled and burned a few years beforehand (at Kinnaird's behest).

But it had been a disaster waiting to happen. Kinnaird and his kin had relied too heavily on the harvesting of marram grass and heather for thatching and bedding, and too many peats had been cut. This made the soil more labile than it had been. Nairn council banned marram-pulling in the 1660s but it was a time of famine, long, cold winters, and poor harvests. Farmers did it on the fly.

Kinnaird was ruined.

In 1909 foresters began a planting regime that lasted on and off for 40 years. Corsican pine took well to the topography. Nowadays it is a joy to walk among the mature pines, long after the ground on which you stood in shifted like the Sahara. And you never knew what would happen next.

THE LOST VILLAGE by Andy Murray

Along the sweeping strand

A salty breeze licks tree trunks

White as bone,

A winch keeks

From the rusted deep,

Shells and flints come calling

To this arc of silent sands,

Ribboned in pines.

These are the phantom acres

Of Scotland’s Pompeii:

Farms, dovecotes, chapels

And orchards smothered forever.

A rich man’s mansion

And the fattest of land

Vanished underground

In a sandstorm in 1694.

Its chimney stood

Above the soil over there,

A man yelled down it

Generations after the disaster

And ran from his own echo.

Or was it the voice of a village ghost?

The topmost branches

Of long-buried trees

Emerge to grow cherries and apples

Now and then

But the sands

Come back to claim them.

They blamed the witches of the firth,

Strangled and burned

By the laird Kinnaird.

Or a curse from God for playing cards

On Sundays, or hiding smugglers

From the gauger.

Some say the blacksmith

Forged bolts for elves and fairies,

But the folk of the north

Were uncowed by curses.

When the shifting sands uncovered

Parts of the mansion,

They barrowed stones away

For their biggings,