Hope, Inverallochy's resident dolphin

 Hope the dolphin, designed by marine biologist Alice Doyle as part of Aberdeen's recent Wild Dolphins charity project has taken up residence on  a drying green near Inverallochy Golf Course. Inspired by the beauty of the scenery and wildlife of the North East, Hope is currently seasonably bedecked in Christmas fairy lights as he looks out over the stormy North Sea.

Pittulie landscape with geese

Pittulie Castle with Peathill Kirk beyond and  a field of watchful gleaning geese

The storms of the last few days have removed the last vestiges of summer from the Buchan landscape, the last of the harebells and campions are gone - blasted by the wind, battered by the rain, only a few bedraggled yellow tansies and the white clusters of yarrow have survived.  The winds that destroyed the flowers have brought in overwintering geese, curlews and starlings. Great  arrows of honking geese, winging in from the sea in noisy skeins which graze on the stubble fields, restless and wary of passers by. Elsewhere by the shore there are large groups of curlews and flocks of starlings flying between field and shoreline where they chatter and rake through the storm debris. The nearby Loch of Strathbeg reserve reports record numbers of pink footed geese this year - around 64,500 -about 30% of the world population at the last count.


At the dykesides rosehips glow brightly red and there are ripening brambles

Mintlaw Beeches: How art the mighty fallen

The magnificent avenue of beeches which lined the road north of Mintlaw between East Mains of Pitfour and Taitswells has fallen victim to the developer's axe. 

The trees in December 2013

 October 2014

So very sad that these stately trees, centuries old and part of the plantings by the Fergusons of Pitfour are reduced to this by the demand for ever more housing on greenfield sites, in this case North Woods Mintlaw.

Udny Green Morthouse

The village of Udny is centred round the village green, quite unlike the usual village layout in the North East. The green is surrounded on three sides by tall beech trees and is overseen by the Victorian parish church.

 The kirkyard is at the opposite, lower end of the green and contains the extraordinary circular morthouse. 

In 1505 a law was passed allocating anatomists one corpse annually on which to practice dissection, from 1694 the bodies of vagrants, suicides, those who had been executed or died in what were termed 'houses of correction' could be used. Supply did not meet demand and there was a gristly if lucrative trade in the exhumation of  freshly buried corpses which were sold on to medical schools. The fear of newly buried bodies being exhumed was very real so many kirkyards had high gated walls and watch houses in which relatives could keep nightly vigils until the corpse was too decomposed to be useful. In other instances heavy metal mortsafes were placed over the grave or alternatively, as at Udny the coffin could be stored in  secure morthouse until it was beyond dissection.

 The morthouse was built in 1832, the year in which the Anatomy (Scotland) Act dramatically reduced the incidences of grave robbing which the morthouse  was intended to counteract.

The ingenious, windowless morthouse was designed by John Marr of Cairnbrogie and contains a turntable on which coffins were placed for at least seven days. The turntable was ratcheted round to allow more coffins to be placed in through the single door, coffins were removed in sequence for burial. The sturdy oak outer door had   a complex lock which needed three separate keyholders to be present to unlock it. Within the outer door was a sliding metal door.

During the Second World War the morthouse was used as a rifle store.

A modern replica of a mortsafe at the Doune Kirkyard, Rothiemurchus

Migrant geese

Wandering over the autumnally chilly Wastart this morning between Craig Ogston and Haven of Braco we heard, then saw the first migrant geese of the year. 

'The lang, lang skeins o' beating wings, cam fleein' fae the north'.

The Highland Lady's Rothiemurchus revisited

'The beautiful plain of Rothiemurchus opening out before us as we advanced, with its lakes and rivers and forest and mountain glens.....'

'The wide plain of the fir trees, feasting our eyes on the fine range of the Cairngorm'

'All through the forest small rivers ran...




......many lakes of various sizes spread their tranquil waters here and there in lonely beauty'

Pike Bay,Loch an Eilein,the Lake of the Island

Loch Gamhna

Lochan Mor

Lochan Deo

'A great number of paths crossed the forest and one or two cart roads'

'Pretty hollows in the birch wood'

'In a country of such remarkable beauty and with so many objects of interest our long walks became delightful'.

Cairnbulg: Wild flowers around the Monkey Pole and Blin May's grave

Cairnbulg Harbour at Westhaven, Fraserburgh and Kinnaird Head Lighthouse on the horizon across an almost unbelievably blue sea

The bents stretch westwards towards the water of Philorth, and Fraserburgh Bay on a beautiful late summer day it was hard to imagine what grim scenes the bents  have witnessed in the past.

The 'Monkey Pole' with the former coastguard lookout station in the background. This is  Cairnbulg Briggs have claimed many ship wrecks, the wreck of the Sovereign which went down in 2005 still lies a little offshore.

The Monkey Pole was used for practice in using a breeches bouy by the 'Rocket Brigade',  the local RNLI volunteers, who went to the aid of ships in distress. A volunteer would climb the Monkey Pole which was used as the target at which the rocket carrying a thin rope was fired, as if to the mast of the stricken ship. The volunteer perched on the pole would catch the rope which enabled the breeches bouy to be set up between the 'ship' and 'shore' so that the crew could be hauled to safety. The life saving equipment  was installed  at  several fishing villages in the area in 1826 and was last used at Cairnbulg in 1985

The 1849 cholera epidemic was the first and most severe of two outbreaks of the disease, the second  was in 1866, and had a devastating effect on the population of  Cairnbulg, the disease is thought to have been introduced by the crew of a boat which had returned from Montrose where they had been collecting  mussels for use as bait. The disease was described as being a particularly virulent form which struck great numbers of people down very quickly, many were apparently healthy when the went to bed but had died by morning. As was the norm in most communities at that time, sanitation in the villages  left much to be desired, 'ash pits with noisome refuse stood at every door, and cesspools with foetid gasses lay all about poisoning the air. In such circumstances it was no wonder that the plague spread among the inhabitants like a forest fire'. (Robert Wilson; 'George Mathieson, Schoolmaster, a Memoir') Those who could fled the village, others who could not afford to do so - especially after a bye law was passed in Fraserburgh forbidding anyone from taking in relatives from the infected area - lived some distance from the houses in unturned boats on the shore. So many people died that it was difficult to find anyone to carry the bodies over to the kirkyard at St Combs. This and a reluctance to carry infected corpses through the village may explain why Mary was buried on the bents. During  the 1849 epidemic  the Inverallochy dominie, George Mathieson, having refused an offer of accommodation at Rathen Manse,  turned the school into a hospital and invited the visiting medical officer to stay in the schoolhouse. Together the two men  worked tirelessly to treat patients and, in Mathieson's case, to clear the streets of refuse and provide practical  domestic support to families where the parents were ill. Mr Mathieson used what he had learned from the earlier outbreak to help again when a less severe outbreak occurred in 1866. After each outbreak the parishioners expressed their appreciation of the dominie's actions by making a presentation to him.

The bents already have a distinctly autumnal look, many wild flowers clearly being 'past' with characterised by withered  ragwort and silky drifting thistle seeds. However, there are bluebells still and everywhere patches of heartsease pansies  (Viola tricolour) which flourish on the sandy soil of the dunes.

In damper areas there were the spears of flag iris, the flowers long gone but replaced by  huge seed pods.

Among the iris the aromatic leaves and mauve flower head of water mint  (Mentha aquatica) 
We searched in vain here for the most beautiful and elusive of all the late summer flowers, Grass of Parnassus which occurs in  a few favoured damp spots along the coast.

The Water of Philorth estuary. At low tide it is just  possible to take a short cut to Fraserburgh along the beach rather than going round by the road bridge upstream near Cairnbulg Castle.

An old Belger saying reflects this:

'Saun i sey ooot (Sand if sea out)
Brig i sey in (Bridge if sea in)

On the opposite side of the Water of Philorth we were rewarded by finding a familiar colony of delicate 

Grass of Parnassus (Parnasia paulustris)

The Doune of Rothiemurchus;The Highland Lady Safari

Grey Granite, T and MA, were recently privileged to experience a 'Highland Lady Safari' on the Rothiemurchus estate. Led by a knowledgeable estate Ranger this included visits the Loch an Eilean and the Doune of Rothiemurchus, so vividly described by Elizabeth Grant of Rothiemurchus (1797-1885), author of the celebrated Memoirs of  Highland Lady.

Loch an Eilein Castle, a favourite haunt of  Elizabeth Grant, in her day the nesting place of 'fish eagles'.
'And the face of nature so beautiful - rivers, lakes, burnies, fields, banks, braes, moors, woods, mountains, heather, the dark forest, wild animals, wild flowers, wild fruits.'
.

Heavy rain had caused the Spey to burst its banks and the day before our visit the fields between the Doune Farm road and the Spey were completely under water. Elizabeth Grant records that this flooding has long been been a problem.

The Doune takes its name from the boat shaped mound next to the house. There was a hill fort, or dun,  on the hill which was the home of the Shaws who were lairds of Rothiemurchus until the 16th century when the estate passed to the Grants who have retained lairdship for over four centuries.

The oldest wing of the Doune, the remains of the Doune Hill are on the right. In her journals from around  1808 onwards Elizabeth Grant mourned the loss of much of the hill and landscaping of the gardens and policies as successive modifications were made to the house.

The Highland Lady complained bitterly about the landscaping of the parkland and the removal of the kitchen garden from close to the house to an inconvenient distance away. 'Among the series of pretty hollows in the birch wood between The Drum and the Miltown moor, a fashion of the day to remove the fruit and the vegetables an inconvenient distance from the cook'.

Oldest part of the present Doune, the wing on the right in the picture above, was built by the Shaws in the early 16th  century and has now been sympathetically restored. The Georgian frontage contained a library and  dining room with cellars below and bedrooms above.

Marriage stone, on the old part of the house,  dated 1598 erected by Patrick Grant on his marriage to Jean Gordon

The inviting entrance to the restored wing of the Doune  now home of Johnny and Philippa Grant 

The attractive formal gardens by the present main entrance to the old part of the house.

Following requisition by the Army during WW2 the Doune, like so many similar properties, gradually became semi derelict. Renovation, which is still on going, was begun by Johnnie Grant of Rothiemurchus in 1978.

An  intricate  cornice above the bow window to the right of the front door of the Georgian wing, a dauntingly huge amount of work remains to be done to fully restore the Doune to its former glory.

Elizabeth Grant records that work on the new library was complete by the family's arrival back at the Doune in 1814.The walls were painted in French grey with black panelling.The room, a favourite retreat of Elizabeth, held a library of between three and four thousand book, carefully catalogued and arranged in bookcases made from fir from the Rothiemurchus forest. Elizabeth writes the 'it was from these silent teachers that we very much received an education'.

The present ruinous church in the Doune policies was rebuilt around 1830 by John Peter Grant of Rothiemurchus, on the site of a much earlier church of which only the windowless side facing the Doune was incorporated in to the replacement. Writing in 1812 Elizabeth Grant remarks on the dilapidated state of the church and neglected graveyard. This was the parish church for Rothiemurchus and two poorly attended services,one in English, the other in Gaelic were held each Sunday.

The original church was dedicated to St Tuchaldus and is first mentioned in the Register of the Bishops of Moray in 1229. Tuchaldus was an itinerant Culdee missionary who built a grain mill, powered by water from the Allt na Cardoch burn, in what is now the North East corner of the kirkyard.

The grave of Shaw Mor, also known as Farquhar Shaw who died in 1405. According to local tradition death or at least ill fortune will befall anyone who removes the large cheese shaped stones from his grave. The 'mortsafe' is a comparatively recent addition to prevent the removal of the stones which has become something of a 'dare'.  A large accumulation of coins has been thrown through the grill onto the stones. There is a genuine mortsafe, now partially buried lying in the in grass within the ruins of the church.

A Sexton Beetle, (Nicrophorus investigator) on the remains of a dead bird, appropriately in the kirkyard. These beetles are said to be able to scent carrion over huge distances and are named for their habit of burying decaying matter.