BALINTORE TO ROCKFIELD

The observant reader will notice that the title of this walk is not an anagram of the places we were walking. The unobservant reader will not have noticed that the last few blogs have been titled with anagrams.

The reason for that is that we were confused as to whether we had done this walk before. In fact, we had, but in the opposite direction, some 10 years before, almost to the day.

So, from now on the walks will be described with a simple statement of where we actually walked. If I thought that would eliminate all chance of confusion, I would be delighted, but I am afraid that confusion is a default state for some of us.

That would also seem to be something that afflicts the residents of Balintore as the weather stone below shows. Even I don't need a stone to tell me if it is raining - and I come from Fort William where it is always raining.

Janet was glad to see that Lorna knows when to use an apostrophe.

 Lorna's garden was very nice too.

This might be something to do with where she lived. Balintore translates from the Gaelic - Baile an Todhair, which could mean town of the dung heap. That would explain the prolific flowers. I note, however, that the community has a website devoted to the Seaboard villages and there, Baile an Todhair is given the alternative meaning of Bleaching Town. I can see why they preferred that to dung heap.

There is a very nice beach stretching between Balintore and Shandwick. Balintore may have a Gaelic name, but Shandwick is more obviously Viking in origin. Wick comes from the old Norse vik, meaning bay. Sand is the old Norse meaning, well, sand. So weirdly Shandwick Bay translates as Sand Bay Bay. Maybe the Vikings had never seen so much sand before.

This part of the walk was undertaken by only some of the party as Robin, Jimmy, Mac and myself were taking cars to Rockfield so that we might get home after the walk. So we were nice and dry while the heavy showers swept in from the west across the sea. It was all very atmospheric, though.

"How can there be 6 effin Fs in this paragraph. I just don't understand technology!"

Soon  the drivers return and the sun comes out. Here I am changing my shoes. You have no idea how fortunate I was to check my car boot before we left Rockfield. I expected to find that Sharon had left something behind and, here, it was stupid old me who nearly got to the start of the walk without a pair of walking boots! I can still hear the scoffing and ridicule that would have ensued. As I am the blog writer, such a catastrophe would, of course not have appeared and so it would be impossible to prove.

Soon we were leaving the car park at Balintore and heading up the coast to Rockfield. At this point most of us were blissfully unaware that we had we had walked the other way just 10 years ago.

The harbour at Balintore was built in 1892. There is little doubt that the harbour was an absolute necessity, as prior to then, boats were landing on the beach at some peril. The village website contains a report that in March 1888 - 

Small boats from  Balintore, Hilton and Shandwick had returned after fishing for haddock. There was a heavy surf on the beach and they had to land one by one between the waves. One boat was swamped to the danger of the crew's lives, but help from the shore saw them to safety. The Shandwick boats had to land there as Shandwick Bay was too dangerous. They were piloted in by Balintore fishermen, but one boat tried to land without help and was dashed on the rocks, but the crew were helped ashore. A Hilton boat was also thrown on the rocks at Cadboll and the crew were saved. Two Hilton women helping in the sea were overpowered by a wave but were rescued. Donald Vass, a Balintore joiner had his teeth knocked out by an oar while in the water helping. The fervent hope of the community was that the new harbour would end this problem. Too late for Donald's teeth, which one assumes are still somewhere in the sand.

If they were in boats like this one at the harbour, then they were braver men than me. In fact, I am pretty sure they were braver than me no matter what size of boat they were in.

 On our walk towards the end of the road, we came to the Seaboard Sculpture Trail. This is based on themes reflecting the characteristics of the area. Amazingly given Pam's little quiz about Fs, they all begin with F too. The one below is Fortitude. Even more amazing it depicts Effie of the two oars. She rescued an abandoned fishing boat after it had been left by the men of it's crew who fled the Press Gang that would have forced them into the Navy.

The Mermaid of the North represents Folklore. She is actually the second Mermaid at the 

site as the first was damaged in a storm, the new one dates from 2014. 

The rock that she sits on is the Clach Dubh - Black Rock.

Faith is illustrated by John Ross (1842-1915) who translated the Bible into Korean. He is apparently still celebrated there, even though he seems not to have ever set foot in Korea, instead being a missionary in China.

The village website has a huge amount of information about people from the villages who were involved in the First World War. I was browsing through this when I came across reference to John Ross's son, Finlay McFadyen Ross. He was born in China where his father was on a mission, and was educated at George Watson's School in Edinburgh before studying forestry at Edinburgh University.  He joined up and went to France in September 1914 and was wounded in June of the next year. He then returned to France in October 1915, some 3 months after his father had died in Edinburgh. He was wounded again in November 1916 when he had assumed command of a raid against the enemy, also bringing back the body of his 2nd Lieutenant and for this he was awarded the Military Cross.

He went back to France a 3rd,unlucky, time, where he was killed leading his men during the Battle of Soissonnais. He was 25 and is buried in a British Cemetery at Villemontoire.

This website is full of extraordinary and poignant tales of  bravery exhibited by men and women from the Seaboard villages and well worth a read through. It is not all heroism and bravery, though. Special mention is made of Dickie the horse. He belonged to the Commercial Hotel in the village and used to carry barrels of ale from Fearn station. He would be tethered in the village, but was known to escape and charge through the streets, scattering children, eating flowers and drinking rainwater from barrels outside houses. This was the only water people had for drinking and cooking before the advent of piped water. However, nobody blamed the horse because he had been at the front during the war and you could see the madness in his eyes! 

Just in case you had forgotten where we were, this is the John Ross sculpture.

The Four Corners of the Earth are represented by the compass rose set in the ground to mark the beginning and end of the many journeys local folk have made to the ends of the earth.

The salmon sculpture represents Fishing, which was and is so important to the villages.

A weeping Elm. They are not truly weeping, but have a more horizontal habit than the much more common Wych Elm. You don't see very many of them this far north.

Off down the main street.

This looks like a whale rib bone on the shed. Certainly whaling was something that went on locally. Indeed, in 1896 a case against the butcher in Balintore raised by 3 Invergordon ferrymen was settled out of court. The case concerned the price they were promised to deliver a whale to him! You don't see many whales in Duncan Fraser's shop!

You will remember the troubles the fishermen had with the wind when landing. This tree shows just which way the prevailing wind blows.

For such a nautical place it is quite appropriate that there were a lot of Red Admiral butterflies about.

The new "Pictish" stone at Hilton of Cadboll. It is actually a hand carved replica of the original Pictish stone which is now to be found in the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.

That was us out of the houses and into the countryside by the beach. Nice easy walking and lots to see.

These poles were used to dry fishing nets.

This is how the nets were winched ashore for drying.

Looking back to the Seaboard Villages.

Looking across the Moray Firth to the Cairngorm Mountains and the Lairig Ghru, a distance of nearly 50 miles!

Time for lunch on the beach and a chance to marvel at the range of stones.

Some serious eating and drinking going on here.

A well trained Jimmy cleans out the crockery.

As we got further towards Rockfield, the coastline became a bit more rugged and interesting.

The lunchtime group photo. I actually took 4, but none had all of the group looking at the camera. In this one only Jimmy is staring out to sea.

There was a kind of Jurassic feel to the rocks - some thought a Game of Thrones look. This rock seemed to me a bit like a chameleon crouching by the shore.

A nice rounded conglomerate. These are clastic sedimentary rocks. The clasts are the bits of rock you can see that have been bound together by finer material that has cemented the whole together. They are relatively common on beaches as the wave action grinds and rounds stones and stirs up sands and sediments. If the mixture of stones and sediments becomes buried and subject to pressure, it forms these conglomerates. Conglomerates have been found on Mars. The clasts were rounded suggesting that they had been acted upon by water and so, the stone suggested that there had been water present on Mars at some time. This blog is nothing if not far reaching.

Off we go with a spring in our steps after lunch.

The cliffs beside the coast will create updraughts of air that would be just the very thing for buzzards to soar up on. Sure enough they did.

There were a lot of birds about. This was a flight of Redshanks. These are the commonest medium sized wading birds in the area.

An Oystercatcher. This is an adult bird.The juveniles have grey legs rather than pink.

These are Cormorants and they look like hunched up old men, but Maureen thought they were rather more statuesque than that. There are two different groups of them here and Maureen is right about the second ones and I am right about the top group.

More Redshanks.

Curlews flying by.

Herring Gulls.

Walking towards Tarrel Bothie. The spelling of bothie is a bit different from the usual bothy. However, you can look up the spelling of place names used by the Ordnance Survey. They list a number of people that they consulted in order to apply place names when maps were being drawn up. This one was attested by 3 different sources as being bothie and it was at the time (1848-1852) a dwellinghouse in good repair and belonging to Kenneth Murray of Geanies, which lies a little inland.

Birds weren't the only wildlife about. We were being watched by seals for a lot of the time. These were grey seals, which are a bit bigger than common seals. They are less common than common seals, of which there are about 1500 in the Moray Firth, as opposed to 500 greys.

There were plenty Scottish Bluebells to be seen. They are also known as Harebells, but the more romantic Gaelic name is Currac-cuthaige, which means Cuckoo's cap.

Still on the wildlife theme, there was this rock that looked like a shark's head.

There were also these pine cones that looked like perching owls. Well they did to me at first. It was a bit far away to identify the species, but only the firs and some cedars have cones which are this sort of size and upright as opposed to hanging.

5 seals watching us. At one point there were 7 of them.

These rocks are apparently known as the 3 sisters, but I can't trace any traditions associated with them. However, the coast is pretty rocky and there have been lots of shipwrecks here over the years.

One of the saddest must have been the running aground of The Linnet below Cadboll House in October 1842. In January 1843 the Linnet was bought and refloated by men from the villages. She was lost in a storm while they tried to get her to Balintore Bay and 7 men from the villages were drowned.

More oddly, in January 1867, a vessel en route from Malta to Leith was driven north by heavy gales and it was wrecked at Balintore. The crew were rescued by locals, but it's cargo of oranges were washed ashore and sold for marmalade on the streets of Tain and Invergordon by local fishwives. 

Is it a dolphin? Is it a whale? No, its a rock poking out of the sand.

An adult Great Black-backed Gull, with two juveniles. The juveniles are in their first year and the adult is at least 4 years old. The black back does not develop until the spring of their 3rd calendar year. The yellow beak with an orange spot is a sign of an adult of at least 4 years.

Heading to Rockfield and the end is in sight. I spoke to an old man at Balintore harbour who said that Rockfield was now empty - by that he meant that the houses were holiday homes or let out. His wife's grandparents had been born in Rockfield, but there were no locals left there. A bit rich given he had a north of England accent, but he did say he had lived in Balintore for over 60 years!

There was plenty evidence of sheep grazing all along the walk, but these were the first that we saw.

They seemed quite bemused to see us too.

Once we left the sheep alone, it was into the cars and off to Carnegie Hall for tea and cakes. No, not the one in New York, but the one in Portmahomack, which has a very nice little cafe attached. It was also a very hot little cafe, but the tea and cakes were very good. We will be back.

There was a stone plaque just outside the entrance. It was placed to recognise the bravery of 4 local fishermen who had rescued the survivors of the SS Sterling in 1910.

Finally next door to the hall was a well dedicated to St. Colman.

Portmahomack derives from the Gaelic Port mo Chalmaig, which translates as Haven or harbour of St Colmoc. Colmoc's identity is unknown, but his name might have been an affectionate form referring to one of a number of Irish Saints and monks called Colman.

Whatever the truth of his name, the walk and the refreshments really cut the mustard, so thanks to Susan and Robin for arranging everything - especially the brow furrowing debate about whether we had been there before.