Rattray Head

I know the name from the Shipping Forecast, tucked between Cape Wrath and Berwick-upon-Tweed, and yet I have never set foot here. Odd, that. A name can live in your head for years before the place ever does.

The Aberdeenshire coast does not do gentle. Gurly rocks and cliffs run for miles, broken here and there by sand, shingle and boulders, and for centuries this stretch chewed up sailing ships that strayed too close on a lee shore in bad weather. The Skellies, those long narrow ribbons of rock, were feared by every mariner who worked these waters. Before David Alan Stevenson built the lighthouse in 1895, wreck after wreck piled up here. The sea gave, but it also took, and it took often.

It gave a living too, mind. In the photo, the three ruined farm-steadings and a row of seven “but ‘n’ bens”¹I haven’t been able to verify this but I believe a “but and ben” is a simple small two-roomed cottage. The “but” refers to the outer room, the kitchen end, and “ben” is the inner room, the parlour or bedroom. Two rooms, one door between them. mark what is left of a fishing hamlet, sitting almost within touching distance of the lighthouse. The map still calls it Seatown. Locals called it Botany Village, and that name is slowly being forgotten²GHOST VILLAGE IS NOT FORGOTTEN. Buchan Observer and East Aberdeenshire Advertiser. 26 July 1983. Page 14..

Whole families worked this patch of coast, most of them related to one another. The men fished, the women gutted and cured the catch to make it last, and rabbits were trapped to fill the gaps. Then, between the wars, people drifted away and the village began to crumble. The Second World War finished the job: the row of cottages was flattened to make way for minefields, part of a defensive line of fourteen pillboxes built to guard the beach and the airfield at Crimond nearby. Four grass-covered mounds between the furthest two buildings are all that is left of that demolished hamlet.

Most of the wartime defences have gone the same way, though the pillboxes still poke out behind the dunes, stubborn as ever. One is cleverer than the rest. It has been disguised as the corner of that furthest ruined farm-steading, its concrete dressed in rubble masonry so it passes, at a glance, for just another broken wall³SM11319: Rattray Line, pill box at Seatown. Trove.scot. https://www.trove.scot/designation/SM11319.

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  I haven’t been able to verify this but I believe a “but and ben” is a simple small two-roomed cottage. The “but” refers to the outer room, the kitchen end, and “ben” is the inner room, the parlour or bedroom. Two rooms, one door between them. ↩︎
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  GHOST VILLAGE IS NOT FORGOTTEN. Buchan Observer and East Aberdeenshire Advertiser. 26 July 1983. Page 14. ↩︎
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  SM11319: Rattray Line, pill box at Seatown. Trove.scot. https://www.trove.scot/designation/SM11319 ↩︎