Category: Moray
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Innes Links: Guarding an Invasion That Never Came
The Moray coast has a long memory, and these blocks are part of it. After the fall of Norway in 1940, Britain feared the Germans might try landing somewhere just like this: flat, open, and horribly easy to invade. So an eight kilometre chain of defences went up between Kingston and Lossiemouth, known simply as…
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Culbin: Where the Sand Swallowed Sixteen Farms
Culbin is a forest made by man, not by nature. Scots and Corsican pines were planted here in the 1930s to pin down dunes that had swallowed whole farms and refused to give them back. Three centuries ago, sand buried a whole estate of sixteen farms, and it has stayed buried ever since. Before the…
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Horse and Hattock: How a Lord of Duffus Woke Up in Paris
Duffus Castle sits on a man-made mound of gravel in Moray, looking like a sandcastle a giant might have built. That impression is not far off the truth. The first castle here went up around 1150, made entirely of wood, started by a Flemish mercenary called Freskin and finished by his son William, who swapped…
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Spey Viaduct
Top tip: do not put blind faith in the OS App when planning a route. Switch on the “Precise point info” layer at the very least, though in this case “Blocked path” is a masterpiece of British understatement. I have seen that same warning slapped on a fallen twig or a bit of squelchy mud,…