Driving north through the coastal hinterland of North East Scotland, the countryside is open and rolling on a large but gentle scale. Hillsides of corn and scattered trees are interspersed with small patches of woodland. Low on the western horizon there’s an occasional sight of Highland mountain and to the east, the sea with glimpses of cliff and sea stack.

Human habitation is spread out but always in view; single farms, small villages, small towns, the small harbour city of Aberdeen. The stronger wildflowers survive in hedgerows and dry stone walls, lapwing still startle into the sky like flurries of scraps of black bin bag, buzzards still float from the forest plantations to hunt the lines of corn. And on the cliffs in spring when the sea birds come in, nature can be found in full teeming, raucous glory.

Those cliffs end where the River Dee runs into Aberdeen’s harbour, marking the southern edge of a long, shallow bay edged by a fifteen mile stretch of gold-pink sand. Near the northern end of this bay, the old coast road through Newburgh leads over the Waterside Bridge across the Ythan estuary. There’s a car park on its north end and down the path along the estuary towards the sea a little way, a very different land lies behind the corn fields; a desert land. High storm blown dunes break in waves of marram grass over a sea of sand and inhospitable moorland. Walking north, there’s no sign of human habitation, until you reach Forvie Kirk at Rockend where the cliffs begin again.

For 500 years people have come to the ruins of Forvie Kirk. These days they come as strangers to stand and wonder what might have happened here.

For forty summers I have not returned to these broken walls logged down in sand, the alcove for the chalice lying empty.

'Let nothing be found in Forvie’s glebes but thystl, bente and sand'

500 years ago they might have come to stand and remember.

This was a green place until then, a place replete with God’s bounty; the land fertile and the sea rich in fish. The people toiled in His grace, living simply, decently.

'Let nothing be found in Forvie’s glebes but thystl, bente and sand'

Perhaps, 500 years ago, the last pastor of Forvie Kirk might have stood here, reliving the story of the kirk, and its people. Nothing but the briefest of outlines has survived the intervening centuries but if someone were to stand here long enough perhaps they’d hear the tale in the wind among the stones,

I failed them, allowed them to refute their grave sin. The price they paid was terrible, and now at last I must pay my own.

in the waves breaking on the shore,

I am come unto my time of dying. I know this, for today I saw the bird again. I watched it at length. It is a thing of the sea, but it is dark, and it flies strong and straight over the wave-crests. When it chances upon the terns, it harries them. It twists and turns in relentless pursuit. For all its dreadful persistence, it never utters any cry. I know that it is the self-same bird, and from whence it came. I know it by the ribbons at its tail.

and in the sand trickling between the blades of marram.

It returns to mark my passing. If the tale is to be told then I must tell it now, there are no longer any others.

'Let nothing be found...'

Within my tiny kirk, I can picture my young self, frowning. The thick walls were built to defy the blast of winter. There was no portal on the eastern side, where the gale from the sea probed the blank, knitted stones. No gleam of sun squeezed through. Rush-light alone scattered the shadows. I can remember the veils of sand-grains dancing over the flags, charmed by the phantom draught.

I recall that shroud of soft crystal, descending over Forvie.

Maly Couper was there, hunched before the altar, clutching her beads, her prayers interspersed with sobs. She pleaded but craved deliverance instead of forgiveness. Mere denial would bring no relief.

“Maly, why have you come here?” I asked it although I knew already. Forty years ago, and yet this was not the beginning of the tale.

“She curses us, Father!”. The woman was plump and comfortable, not accustomed to this despair. They were well established in this place but her kinfolk nonetheless reached too far and took too much. And for my own sins, I was still an appeaser then.

“She will relent, Maly. I think she will go with me, her sister too, over the river and away from here”.

“And so the sand will not come?” she begged, almost.

“No. Be at peace, my child. The sand will not come”.

I said it then. I believed it then.

'… but thystl, bente and sand'

There were three sisters. The daughters of Jame Malison, who kept him and tended his land as his sight dwindled and his thoughts became as cloud. The eldest, Mage, was proud and self-willed. Twenty years old in that dreadful summer, she was made of her father’s stuff. The middle daughter, Canny, was provocative and headstrong. The young men followed in her careless footsteps, and she did not expect their betrayal.

For Isabell, it was her sixteenth and last summer. She was her mother’s child, her long hair was as black water, and she skipped over shore and heath. She knew the birds and the flowers and the seasons, and that was enough.

The final snow was melting when Jame left us. The villagers laid him in the ground alongside the kirk, and straight away began to covet his homestead and the little fields that he had dutifully tilled through all those years. Maly Couper and her menfolk had a claim, that the land was in right descent theirs. They had cultivated their ambition, mixing it with their seed for generations. In a lonely place like this one, entitlement is underpinned by blood and numbers.

The eviction of the sisters was not a violent act, but I see now that it was a cruel one. Strong men, several in number, took up their possessions and moved them down into the small house by the Burn of Sanyne. The thatch was repaired, in a gesture that the marauders thought fair and decent, and their dead mother’s birth-home was taken from them. They went unwillingly but did not resist.

I thought that the sisters would leave Forvie. There were clansfolk of their father south of the Ythan, and they would surely be well received. But for forty years I have wished that I had presumed less and listened more. I wish, indeed, that I had taken their part.

Kine never sickened like those of the incomers did. They were pastured on the swale along the burn, and stabled in the great stone byre that had been the sisters’. The animals should have flourished but instead they wasted. Before the moon was out, they rolled and shuddered, with clouded eyes and blood-flecked nostrils. And Maly’s kin howled in their ire, blaming curses and poisons, threatening revenge.

The skies were lowering, threatening a spring storm, the morning Isabell came to my door. “The cattle are dead”, she said simply. “I would not see them suffer more”. She drew out a bone-handled knife, and laid it in my palm, and turned my fingers about it. Her gaze all the while was steady and sad. I went forth and saw for myself, and it was true. The beasts were at peace, and the fur at their throats was caked with black blood; a sprig of lovage and roseroot laid on each.

It was then that the folk of Forvie set themselves against the sisters. The kindest thing said of them was that they should be gone. I pleaded with Maly’s husband, and I swear that nothing save the fear of God stayed his hand from slaughter. Instead, he deemed that the sisters should be put to sea in an open boat, to fetch up where the tide took them, far from Forvie.

“And what if they should perish among the waters?” I asked.

“Then our dear God shall have made his judgement”, came the reply.

Mage and Canny fought like rats that morning. They gouged and spat and screamed, until Maly’s folk beat the spirit out of them, and they were thrown down into the bottom of the little boat. And yet Isabell sat silent on the thwart, even when Maly seized her hair and hacked it off with the bone-handled knife. What remained fell fanned out across her neck, save for two long, feathery strands that were left hanging down between her shoulders.

There were those ashore who shouted with vengeful triumph as the little boat was shoved into the tiderace. There were those who sneered and nursed their scratches. There were a few who looked away, their expressions beset with worry. But none tried to stop the deed, and none thought to row after and save them, as the sisters were swept from sight.

In the evening of the following day when the storm was nearly blown out and the sun was roiling through a swirl of black cloud, there was a commotion at the kirk door. Mage’s hair was matted, and her cheeks were raw from spray. Her eyes blazed in hatred as she hissed terrible oaths. Canny was there too, and her eyes were different. She was distant and fearful, and she did not speak as she clutched and whimpered at her sister’s sleeve.

Isabell was not there. The storm that flung these others back to shore had claimed her as its payment.

And at that moment came the great, dark bird. I had never seen its like before, and it seemed to wheel out of the sun itself. I watched after it, as it beat low towards the sea, and it was then that I saw its tail. It was unlike the tail of any gull, curved outward in a fan, and with two long plumes trailing at its middle. I fell down praying, and could no longer hear the insults and sobs of the other two.

'… and sand'

In the days that followed, the sand began to blow about, just as in the eldest sister’s curse. There was an ill-remembered story concerning the dunes to the south; that they had appeared in a single night, obliterating the crops and the dykes beneath. Sometimes, after a storm, outlines of round buildings of an earlier people were revealed from under the dunes. Encroachment of the sand in time of storm was nothing new, but Mage promised that soon it would come with untold fury, and that it would bury us all.

Forvie was in terror of the sisters now, and I feared that they would be lynched. I kept them to the kirk where they slept in straw strewn upon the flags and fine trains of sand weaved about them. Mage swore that she would die here, and Canny said nothing and only wept, and I spoke to them as gently as I could, beseeching them to seek peace beyond the river.

At last Mage relented for her sister’s sake and I well remember that morning I set out to row them over the Ythan, away from their tormentors. I hoped that the sight of the boat would not invoke memories of their ordeal, but they sat in silence. A strong breeze began to rise behind us, so that the crossing was made easy, and as we approached the far shore I heard Mage beg for the Lord’s forgiveness, and she recanted her oath. My relief knew no bounds, as I dragged the boat onto the flats and shepherded the sisters up towards the road. But when I looked back, a blanket of night had swathed the horizon and the wind was shrieking. And down the gale it came, wheeling above our heads, its tail-plumes streaming behind.

I could not return to the further shore that day, nor the eight that followed. When at last I rowed back, the boat stuck in shallows that were not there before. I was forced to wade onto an unfamiliar coast, and as I came to the top of the rise I found walls of bare sand beyond it. There were great, sloping dunes where before there had been verdant meadows, and the path across to Forvie was utterly gone.

It took me many hours climbing through running sand to find my way to the kirk, and many more to clear a passage up to its fallen walls. In time to come I would learn enough of the flight of the villagers north to Collieston, and how a few who could not keep up were lost in the cloying, rasping hail. For now, my goal was to enter the remains of my church, to begin my penance and to plead for the mercy of my Maker.

When at last I had dug through, the sun was beginning to set, and there was an odour of death. I recognised tatters of Maly’s robe first. She was curled in a pitiful ball, and as I moved her to lay her corpse more easily sand-crystals poured glittering from her eyes.

Above the ruin of the kirk of Forvie, where the roof was now the sky, I saw the bird I would not see again for forty years, and I begged for the forgiveness of Our Lord in Heaven for these pour souls and my own.

' ...'

There, now the story is told, and I am ready to make an ending. The tide is right. Though I no longer have the strength to row, the waters will carry my boat far out, out to the place where the dark bird goes. I will go there too, and I will find what conclusion I may. I will follow the lost sister, and by so doing I may hope to lift her curse from this sorry, fateful place.

' ...'

“Let nothing be found in Forvie’s glebes but thystl, bente and sand”.

At first sight it seems the curse still stands, 500 years on. But spend some time and it is not as it looks. In spring thousands of eider heads bob up to watch from ling and bell heather where they guard their eggs until they can lead new hatchlings out and across the sand to dive into their first wave. In the dunes, Britain’s scarcest terns nest on shingle beaches stranded after the last ice-age. They flit up and down and into the Ythan after silver sandeels, flying back to dance with them before their mates. Oystercatchers lay eggs in hollows among the sea rocket in the warm sand above high-water and lapwing chicks imitate pebbles on the estuary shore while their mothers try to distract both predatory gulls and visiting walkers.

Buzzards drift silently through the dunes in summer, looking for rabbits grazing turf among heartsease and eyebright; fritillaries bask among the thistles on the edges of the salt marsh, and curlew and redshank stalk the tides in number across the estuary mudflats.

When autumn arrives, passing Osprey drop in, and haul themselves out of the high tide water with laboured wing beats and large fish grasped firmly in both feet. Flocks of waders, whooper swan, and tens of thousand of geese fly in to spend the winter. And on a stormy day, the sharp winged outline of a skua, calling in for shelter on the journey south from its breeding grounds, might be seen again, sweeping silently down out of the sky or lifting from a low run over the waves.

Since the nine day storm that buried the settlement at Rockend 500 years ago, man’s touch here has the lightest. Piled high where the River Ythan meets the sea a great dune of bare shifting sand still stands, like a guard over both the gateway to the estuary and the start of the Sands of Forvie.

Travelling north through the coastal hinterland of North East Scotland, the countryside is open and rolling on a large but gentle scale. Hillsides of corn and scattered trees are interspersed with small patches of woodland. Low on the western horizon there’s an occasional sight of Highland mountain and to the East, the sea with glimpses of cliff and sea stack.

Human habitation is spread out but always in view; single farms, small villages, small towns, the small harbour city of Aberdeen. There is little left of the natural indigenous environment except in the lie of the rivers and the sweep of the land.

The human race has moved too fast in its claims on the land for nature to keep up here, as elsewhere in much of Britain. There are concessions made; wide verges for wildflowers, small corners left in fields, restored areas made into nature reservations. And so the strong among the wildflowers survive in the hedgerows and dry stone walls, flocks of lapwing still startle into the sky like a flurry of scraps of black bin bag, buzzards still float from the forest plantations to hunt the lines of corn. But only on the cliffs in spring when the sea birds come in, is nature found in all its teeming and raucous glory.

Those cliffs end where the River Dee runs into Aberdeen’s harbour, marking the southern edge of a long, shallow bay edged by a fifteen mile stretch of gold-pink sand. Near the northern end of this bay the old coast road through Newburgh leads over the Waterside Bridge across the Ythan estuary. There’s a car park on its north end. If you were to stop here and follow the estuary towards the sea a little way you’d find a very different land behind the usual corn fields; a desert land. High storm blown dunes break in waves of marram grass over a sea of sand and inhospitable moorland. Walking north there’s no sign of human habitation; not until you reach Forvie Kirk at Rockend where the cliffs begin again.

For 500 years people have come to the ruins of Forvie Kirk. These days they come as strangers to stand and wonder what might have happened here.

For forty summers I have not returned to these broken walls logged down in sand, the alcove for the chalice lying empty.

'Let nothing be found in Forvie’s glebes but thystl, bente and sand'

500 years ago they might have come to stand and remember.

This was a green place until then, a place replete with God’s bounty; the land fertile and the sea rich in fish. The people toiled in His grace, living simply, decently.

'Let nothing be found in Forvie’s glebes but thystl, bente and sand'

Perhaps, 500 years ago, the last pastor of Forvie Kirk might have stood here, might have relived the story of the kirk, the people it served, and the sands. If he told it anyone, all but the briefest of outlines has been lost in the intervening centuries. But if someone were to stand here long enough, listening, perhaps they’d hear the tale in the wind among the stones,

I failed them, allowed them to refute their grave sin. The price they paid was terrible, and now at last I must pay my own.

in the waves breaking on the shore,

I am come unto my time of dying. I know this, for today I saw the bird again. I watched it at length. It is a thing of the sea, but it is dark, and it flies strong and straight over the wave-crests. When it chances upon the terns, it harries them. It twists and turns in relentless pursuit. For all its dreadful persistence, it never utters any cry. I know that it is the self-same bird, and from whence it came. I know it by the ribbons at its tail.

and in the sand trickling between the blades of marram.

It returns to mark my passing. If the tale is to be told then I must tell it now, there are no longer any others.

'Let nothing be found...'

Within my tiny kirk, I can picture my young self, frowning. The thick walls were built to defy the blast of winter. There was no portal on the eastern side, where the gale from the sea probed the blank, knitted stones. No gleam of sun squeezed through. Rush-light alone scattered the shadows. I can remember the veils of sand-grains dancing over the flags, charmed by the phantom draught.

I recall that shroud of soft crystal, descending over Forvie.

Maly Couper was there, hunched before the altar, clutching her beads, her prayers interspersed with sobs. She pleaded but craved deliverance instead of forgiveness. Mere denial would bring no relief.

“Maly, why have you come here?” I asked it although I knew already. Forty years ago, and yet this was not the beginning of the tale.

“She curses us, Father!”. The woman was plump and comfortable, not accustomed to this despair. They were well established in this place but her kinfolk nonetheless reached too far and took too much. And for my own sins, I was still an appeaser then.

“She will relent, Maly. I think she will go with me, her sister too, over the river and away from here”.

“And so the sand will not come?” she begged, almost.

“No. Be at peace, my child. The sand will not come”.

I said it then. I believed it then.

'… but thystl, bente and sand'

There were three sisters. The daughters of Jame Malison, who kept him and tended his land as his sight dwindled and his thoughts became as cloud. The eldest, Mage, was proud and self-willed. Twenty years old in that dreadful summer, she was made of her father’s stuff. The middle daughter, Canny, was provocative and headstrong. The young men followed in her careless footsteps, and she did not expect their betrayal.

For Isabell, it was her sixteenth and last summer. She was her mother’s child, her long hair was as black water, and she skipped over shore and heath. She knew the birds and the flowers and the seasons, and that was enough.

The final snow was melting when Jame left us. The villagers laid him in the ground alongside the kirk, and straight away began to covet his homestead and the little fields that he had dutifully tilled through all those years. Maly Couper and her menfolk had a claim, that the land was in right descent theirs. They had cultivated their ambition, mixing it with their seed for generations. In a lonely place like this one, entitlement is underpinned by blood and numbers.

The eviction of the sisters was not a violent act, but I see now that it was a cruel one. Strong men, several in number, took up their possessions and moved them down into the small house by the Burn of Sanyne. The thatch was repaired, in a gesture that the marauders thought fair and decent, and their dead mother’s birth-home was taken from them. They went unwillingly but did not resist.

I thought that the sisters would leave Forvie. There were clansfolk of their father south of the Ythan, and they would surely be well received. But for forty years I have wished that I had presumed less and listened more. I wish, indeed, that I had taken their part.

Kine never sickened like those of the incomers did. They were pastured on the swale along the burn, and stabled in the great stone byre that had been the sisters’. The animals should have flourished but instead they wasted. Before the moon was out, they rolled and shuddered, with clouded eyes and blood-flecked nostrils. And Maly’s kin howled in their ire, blaming curses and poisons, threatening revenge.

The skies were lowering, threatening a spring storm, the morning Isabell came to my door. “The cattle are dead”, she said simply. “I would not see them suffer more”. She drew out a bone-handled knife, and laid it in my palm, and turned my fingers about it. Her gaze all the while was steady and sad. I went forth and saw for myself, and it was true. The beasts were at peace, and the fur at their throats was caked with black blood; a sprig of lovage and roseroot laid on each.

It was then that the folk of Forvie set themselves against the sisters. The kindest thing said of them was that they should be gone. I pleaded with Maly’s husband, and I swear that nothing save the fear of God stayed his hand from slaughter. Instead, he deemed that the sisters should be put to sea in an open boat, to fetch up where the tide took them, far from Forvie.

“And what if they should perish among the waters?” I asked.

“Then our dear God shall have made his judgement”, came the reply.

Mage and Canny fought like rats that morning. They gouged and spat and screamed, until Maly’s folk beat the spirit out of them, and they were thrown down into the bottom of the little boat. And yet Isabell sat silent on the thwart, even when Maly seized her hair and hacked it off with the bone-handled knife. What remained fell fanned out across her neck, save for two long, feathery strands that were left hanging down between her shoulders.

There were those ashore who shouted with vengeful triumph as the little boat was shoved into the tiderace. There were those who sneered and nursed their scratches. There were a few who looked away, their expressions beset with worry. But none tried to stop the deed, and none thought to row after and save them, as the sisters were swept from sight.

In the evening of the following day when the storm was nearly blown out and the sun was roiling through a swirl of black cloud, there was a commotion at the kirk door. Mage’s hair was matted, and her cheeks were raw from spray. Her eyes blazed in hatred as she hissed terrible oaths. Canny was there too, and her eyes were different. She was distant and fearful, and she did not speak as she clutched and whimpered at her sister’s sleeve.

Isabell was not there. The storm that flung these others back to shore had claimed her as its payment.

And at that moment came the great, dark bird. I had never seen its like before, and it seemed to wheel out of the sun itself. I watched after it, as it beat low towards the sea, and it was then that I saw its tail. It was unlike the tail of any gull, curved outward in a fan, and with two long plumes trailing at its middle. I fell down praying, and could no longer hear the insults and sobs of the other two.

'… and sand'

In the days that followed, the sand began to blow about, just as in the eldest sister’s curse. There was an ill-remembered story concerning the dunes to the south; that they had appeared in a single night, obliterating the crops and the dykes beneath. Sometimes, after a storm, outlines of round buildings of an earlier people were revealed from under the dunes. Encroachment of the sand in time of storm was nothing new, but Mage promised that soon it would come with untold fury, and that it would bury us all.

Forvie was in terror of the sisters now, and I feared that they would be lynched. I kept them to the kirk where they slept in straw strewn upon the flags and fine trains of sand weaved about them. Mage swore that she would die here, and Canny said nothing and only wept, and I spoke to them as gently as I could, beseeching them to seek peace beyond the river.

At last Mage relented for her sister’s sake and I well remember that morning I set out to row them over the Ythan, away from their tormentors. I hoped that the sight of the boat would not invoke memories of their ordeal, but they sat in silence. A strong breeze began to rise behind us, so that the crossing was made easy, and as we approached the far shore I heard Mage beg for the Lord’s forgiveness, and she recanted her oath. My relief knew no bounds, as I dragged the boat onto the flats and shepherded the sisters up towards the road. But when I looked back, a blanket of night had swathed the horizon and the wind was shrieking. And down the gale it came, wheeling above our heads, its tail-plumes streaming behind.

I could not return to the further shore that day, nor the eight that followed. When at last I rowed back, the boat stuck in shallows that were not there before. I was forced to wade onto an unfamiliar coast, and as I came to the top of the rise I found walls of new sand beyond it. There were great, sloping dunes where before there had been verdant meadows, and the path across to Forvie was utterly gone.

It took me many hours to find and reach the kirk, and many more to clear a passage up to its fallen walls. In time to come I would learn enough of the flight of the villagers north to Collieston, and how a few who could not keep up were lost in the cloying, rasping hail. For now, my goal was to enter the remains of my church, to begin my penance and to plead for the mercy of my Maker.

When at last I had dug through, the sun was beginning to set, and there was an odour of death. I recognised tatters of Maly’s robe first. She was curled in a pitiful ball, and as I moved her to lay her corpse more easily sand-crystals poured glittering from her eyes.

Above the ruin of the kirk of Forvie, where the roof was now the sky, I saw the bird I would not see again for forty years, and I begged for the forgiveness of Our Lord in Heaven for these pour souls and my own.

' ...'

There, now the story is told, and I am ready to make an ending. The tide is right. Though I no longer have the strength to row, the waters will carry my boat far out, out to the place where the dark bird goes. I will go there too, and I will find what conclusion I may. I will follow the lost sister, and by so doing I may hope to lift her curse from this sorry, fateful place.

' ...'

“Let nothing be found in Forvie’s glebes but thystl, bente and sand”, are almost all of the sisters’ words that have made their way through the centuries.

At first sight a stranger might think that curse still stood, that that was all there was here today, 500 years on. But perhaps that wondering stranger might stop awhile longer in the peace of the deserted Forvie Kirk, with the sky its roof and rabbit cropped grass its floor. Perhaps slow down enough to see.

To see a place where in safety thousands of eider breed in the heather and some of the scarcest of Britain’s terns nest on ancient shingle beaches. A place where through the spring mother eider guard their eggs in the heathland, waiting to lead their new hatchlings out and across the sand to dive without hesitation into their first wave at the sea edge. Terns flit up and down and into the Ythan after the silver sandeels. Oystercatchers lay eggs in hollows among the sea rocket in the warm sand above high-water and lapwing chicks imitate pebbles on the estuary shore while their mothers distract both predatory gulls and visiting walkers.

A place where over the summer, buzzards drift silently through the dunes looking for rabbits grazing turf among heartsease and eyebright; fritillaries bask among the thistles on the edges of the salt marsh, and curlew and redshank stalk the tides in number across the Ythan’s mudflats.

In autumn, passing Osprey drop in, and haul themselves out of the high tide estuary water with laboured wing beats and large fish firmly grasped by both feet. Flocks of waders, whooper swan, and tens of thousand of geese fly in to spend the winter. And on a stormy day, the sharp winged outline of a skua, calling in for shelter on the journey south from its breeding grounds, might be seen again, sweeping silently down out of the sky or lifting from a low run over the waves.

If he stopped and listened and looked for long enough, this stranger might see the great dune of shifting sand, piled high where the River Ythan meets the sea in a twice daily ebb and flow of saltlake and mudflat, standing guard over both the gateway to the estuary and the start of the Sands of Forvie. For since the nine day storm that buried the settlement at Rockend 500 years ago, mankind’s touch here has been of the lightest and the birds and the flowers thrive in freedom at the pace of nature’s seasons.

Footnote:

“If evyr maydenis malysone, dyd licht upon drye lands, let nocht bee funde in Furvye’s gleby’s, bot thystl, bente and sande” is the full text quoted for what the sisters’ said. The settlement at Rockend was buried under the dunes in the early 15th century, all but the ruin of the 12th century kirk. The story told is that in 1413 the village was covered in sand during a nine day storm conjured up by the curse of three sisters who were set adrift in a leaking boat because of a disputed legacy. The rest of the story told here is an exercise in artistic licence. If you want to judge the truth of it, you'll need to go to Forvie, and listen to what's in the air for yourself.

The names used are not real names of course, but were chosen from records of names in use in that area of Scotland close to this period.

The dunes continued to advance northwards after 1413 but stopped in 1759 as they reached Collieston. They are now stable in the north of Forvie, but the sands in the south still move, changing the skyline and making each first visit of the year feel like a walk into unexplored land.