Downies and Stranathro (Muchalls)
(From 'One Foot in the Sea' by Robert Smith)

The village of Downies, two miles south of Findon, is one of the few villages that still retain a flavour of the past. Here the fisherfolk also made their living from smoked haddock, but, oddly enough, the fishers themselves never ate the 'haddies'. Jackie Wood, whose father was a fisherman, remembers his mother smoking haddocks, but says that he only got a 'haddie' if one had fallen into the fire. The main food for the fisher families was salt fish - herring and cod. The Woods were real Doonies people, I was told. Jackie lives at No. 18 and the smokehouse was where the garage is now. His mother, who sold their fish in the Green at Aberdeen, kept hens, while his father grew potatoes in a cliff-top garden.

Downies is a typical 'heugh-heid' village. Its main street ends in a grassy track which seems to plunge over the edge of the cliff into the sea. Its harbour, like so many others, is incredibly small. Standing on top of the cliff, looking down to the shore, I was thinking of Auld Birsie. He was a Downies fisherman who was immortalised by Aberdeen's pioneer photographer George Washington Wilson. Wilson's photograph showed the grizzled old sea dog wearing a fisherman's woollen cap and smoking a 'cutty' - a short clay pipe complete with metal top and chain. Auld Birsie's real name was George Knowles. Born in Downies, he moved to Stonehaven, where three of his grandchildren still live.

Whatever changes take place in Downies, its story will never be lost. Norman Nicoll and his wife, who live at The Bungalow, have made sure of that. Since they came there thirty-six years ago they have been recording the history of the village. Norman has built up a folio of pictures showing the old Downies alongside the modern village. Meanwhile, Mrs Nicoll has amassed a vast amount of information about Downies and its fisher folk, about people like Moses Wood, Doonies Johnnie, Dod's Meg and Aggie Leiper, who lived to be 100, and about the children, their family names, and the houses, which had lime-washed walls and white wood doors. She has peered into the past to find out how the fisher folk dressed - the men always had flannel next to their skin, including thick flannel drawers, and blue serge surcoats; the women wore white cotton chemises (no drawers of any kind), stays and flannel petticoats. No garments were ever taken off inside the houses.

Downies, like all the other villages along the coast, continues to change. There are few members of the old families still living in the community. The in-comers have taken over, many of them oil people. The work that the Nicolls have put into their research is, in a sense, a reaction not only to change but to the authorities' head- in-the-sand attitude to it. Norman Nicoll told me that at one time there was a move to get a Preservation Order at Downies, but nothing came of it. Now the powers-that-be say that the village has changed too much, but, as Norman points out, it was they who allowed the change to take place.

The names of two other tiny fishing villages have been pushed into the background over the years. One is Skateraw, which hangs on to its own identity by the thinnest of threads, for in reality Newtonhill has gobbled it up. The harbour is deserted and the pier gone, yet in 1855 there were fifty fishermen in Skateraw and a fleet of twenty-six boats, including eleven drifters and fifteen yawls. More than 130 people were employed in the fishing. The beginning of the end came in 1852 when the railway came to this corner of Kincardine. The station was named Newtonhill and little Skateraw was ignored. Now the name no longer appears even on the map. 

The other village is Stranathro, which has been absorbed by Muchalls. Like Skateraw, it has virtually lost its original name, although there is a Stranathro Terrace. Stranathro, which become known as Muchalls in the early 1900s, was a prosperous fishing village, but it would never have won any awards for cleanliness. In 1877, it was pictured in one report as 'composed of wretched hovels, built of clay and thatched with straw'. It had no drainage, roads ankle-deep in Mud, and dunghills outside its front doors. The dunghills, like Findon's midden heaps, were made up of 'fish offal and other abominations'.

Yet early this century Muchalls was being lauded as the Scarborough of the North - an ideal health resort'. With a little publicity, it was said, it could be crowded with holidaymakers, hundreds of tourists descending on it in the summer months. But it never happened. Muchalls remained the quiet little village it has always been. The only change to the old fisher-town was that the cottages were 'improved' by what one planner called 'ill-designed and over-large dormer extensions'. Davie Cameron, who lives in one of the Stranathro cottages, thinks that the extensions have spoiled [lie cottages, although his own house has one. When his parents lived in it, it was a typical fisherman's cottage with a dry lavatory. His garden is on the opposite side of the road. Lying in it is the skeleton of a boat which lie intended to reconstruct but never did.

Nature was in a wild mood when it sculpted this part of the Kincardine coast. Some of the most spectacular cliff scenery in Scotland lies along this eastern seaboard. Here, the waves play their unending sea symphony against a backdrop of grotesquely shaped rocks with names like Dunie Fell, Tillie Tenant and Scart's Craig. A rock called the Brown Jewel gave its name to a public house in the village. Mrs Sheila Ogilvie and her late husband, lain, were converting a local stable into a pub in 1974 and wanted to give it a name in keeping with the district. The piece de resistance is the Grim Briggs, two gneiss rocks through which the waves have cut arches 80 ft high by 50 ft wide. Muchalls' answer to the Old Man of Hoy is the Auld Carl, which is often called the Old Man of Muchalls.

Muchalls also has its Gin Shore, whose name is a reminder of the days when a vast amount of smuggling took place along the coast. There is a ghostly link between the Gin Shore and Muchalls Castle, which lies about a mile inland. This 17th century castle, which is noted for its superb plaster ceilings, is said to be haunted by a Green Lady. It also has a secret staircase and a mysterious underground tunnel leading to a cave at the Gin Shore. According to one story the Green Lady is a girl who was drowned while on her way to meet her lover, a gin smuggler. Back in 1896, the Aberdeen Free Press came up with another story about the Muchalls cave. It said that long ago a piper had gone into it playing his bagpipes - and had never returned.

According to one report, the smugglers' tunnel at Muchalls was sealed up by Lord Robertson, Lord Justice General of Scotland, who was tenant of Muchalls Castle at the end of the nineteenth century and took a jaundiced view of smuggling activities on his doorstep. Today, guidebooks usually describe the passage as 'lost'. Like most local people, Davie Cameron is sceptical about the mysterious tunnel, but he says there is a cave - he has been inside it. That was back in the 1930s. There was no sign of any underground passage then, for the cave was completely blocked by huge boulders.

This may have been the 'famous cave' mentioned by the Aberdeen Free Press in May, 1896. Although it was commonly believed that the cave went underground to Muchalls Castle, the only information the newspaper could get about it from local people was 'mostly vague theory', and the same could be said to-day. The Free Press described how two men had set off to explore the cave -'or, like the piper, return no more'. They found that it was 300 ft long, with the height from the entrance to the top of the rock close on 200 ft, while the width at the entrance was 41 ft. The first part of it was 'a spacious vaulted chamber' 130 ft long, 16 ft wide and from 40 ft to 50 ft high.

'Above the entrance inside,' said the report, 'the roof is covered with three different species of beautiful ferns in full foliage. The next part of the cave for 100 ft is little more than 3 ft wide, in one or two places being only 16 in. The height