Haunted Scotland by Roddy Martine Page A

told that it served her right for spending a night at the lodge
on her own. Loch Striven, she learned, was infamous for its sudden storms and unpredictable currents. Nobody has ever kept track of the number of boats that have been lost in this solemn and
unpredictable stretch of water.
    Such anecdotes, of course, are replicated from the Solway Firth to Cape Wrath, from John O’ Groats to Dunbar, vivid accounts of fishing disasters, lost souls, piracy,
brigandage and smuggling.
    Before lighthouses were built, the deliberate wrecking of passing vessels was rife off the East Lothian coast. Cargoes of wine, brandy, wood, fruit, grain and coal
regularly washed ashore, and it was the coastal dwellers’ attitude towards plunder that prompted the author Robert Louis Stevenson to collaborate with his stepson Lloyd Osbourne in writing
his last novel,
The Wrecker
, in 1892. Stevenson’s childhood holidays were spent with relatives in North Berwick and Auldhame exploring the East Lothian coastline and he, more than
anyone, understood how the past leaves its ever-present stamp on the future. Loss and the debris of human tragedy are timeless.
    It was a summer’s afternoon in 2007 when Avril Kirk, whom we will encounter again in Chapter Thirteen, set off to explore Skateraw Harbour, south of Dunbar, where she came across the ruins
of some old cottages and on an impulse followed the pathway to Chapel Point, which has a raised beach.
    Rank forces were at work that day. On Chapel Point, Avril found herself pausing in front of an old stone step. ‘All of a sudden there was a loud booming noise,’ she remembered.
    ‘I was standing in front of a large wooden cross and all around me the light was dimming. There was a small church behind the cross and I could hear waves crashing and seagulls shrieking.
On the pathway ahead of me I could see dark shapes carrying what looked like bodies up from the beach and into the church.’
    In a flash, everything changed back to normal, and Avril stood where she was, stunned. ‘When I arrived home I didn’t want to tell anyone about what had happened in case they thought
I’d lost my mind,’ she said. ‘It was very confusing.’
    On a subsequent visit to Dunbar House Museum, however, all became clear. Quite by chance Avril found herself talking to a genealogist. It is always easier to confide in a stranger whom you are
unlikely to see again and when she mentioned her visitto Skateraw, he confirmed that there had once been an ancient chapel dedicated to St Dennis on Chapel Point.
    ‘It was there long before the cottages were built,’ he told her. ‘And the only thing left when it was demolished was a wooden cross which was later moved to the car park when a
World War Two memorial to the Canongate Boys’ Club was erected.’
    When Avril shyly recounted what had happened to her, he seemed unaffected. ‘Before the lighthouses were built, there were hundreds of ships wrecked on the offshore rocks,’ he
explained. ‘A lot of bodies were washed ashore and brought up from the beach by the locals. The sad thing is that because nobody knew who they belonged to they were mostly buried in the
surrounding fields and not the kirkyard. What you saw was very unusual, but perhaps the corpses were stored in the chapel until somewhere could be found for them.’
    Of course, all of this was macabre, ancient history so far as Jack Shepherd from Bristol was concerned when he booked himself into a farmhouse B&B in the autumn of 2006. He
had been heading south from Edinburgh, and decided to turn off the A1 just north of Dunbar on a whim. The sun was sinking in the west when he arrived in the farmyard and by eight o’clock it
had become dark. Disinclined to go to bed so early, he set off for a stroll in the night air.
    The wind was southerly and a full moon hung like a medallion over the North Sea. The moon path was effervescent as Jack followed the path along the clifftops. Entranced by the sheer drama