Past St Combs

By Scott G Buchan

Four kids went wandering, and were cruel to gentle things. This is an account of their exploits.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jun 7, 2019
• ISBN: 9780244791438

Book preview

Past St Combs

Past St Combs

Scott G Buchan

Copyright © 2013 Scott G Buchan

All rights reserved.

Published by Lulu.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.  Kind of.

ISBN 978-0-244-79143-8

Introduction

I wasn’t going to write another book.  I wrote firstly in the hope that I’d be able to scrape out a living working on my own and with minimal outside interference, and also because I thought that success in fiction would aid me in my quest for female affection.  Although a few people seemed to enjoy the first book, that attention didn’t convert itself into either monetary gain or snuggles from the ladies.  At the time of writing this sentence, I am still owed money by one bookseller whose shop burned to the ground along with a number of copies of Liquid Kids.  Furthermore, it’s been five years since I last held a woman’s hand, far less sniffed the musky cleft.  Adding to my hesitance to tap out another story on the keyboard was the reception that my second self-published novel, Diamond on the Horizon, received; it was utterly ignored.  Whereas my début novel sold a few hundred copies at least, I doubt that I shifted even twenty copies of the follow-up.  I thought that my career as a novelist had reached a natural stop.

The problem I have found is that I am rather quite useless at most things.  I lack the requisite enthusiasm and intellectual flexibility to prosper in any other field.  I am in my thirties; I have a part-time job in a supermarket; I live with my parents.  I can tell stories; that’s about it.  According to a great many professional, however, I can’t tell them to a sufficient standard as to merit the tag of published author.  From a young age, I believed that I was destined to achieve much through prose; I am aware that in uploading this file through lulu.com I am achieving nothing.  Anyone at all can do this.  I know that a dilettante such as I has a nerve to ask a person to pay to read their words.  If you have parted with money in order to peruse this sentence, then I am grateful; and if you haven’t, know that I regard your time as a worthy donation.  There’s a three-year gap between this book and the last one; during that period, there was no clamour to hear more from me.  I’m certainly not assuming that this page will be looked at by many people.  I am writing this book simply because there is nothing else for me.

The motivation to write hasn’t been there as of late, but that isn’t to say that my imagination has been in total hibernation; I’ve had a few ideas for potential novels since Diamond.  I thought about writing another Derek Gibson story; perhaps inveigling him with the shadier foreigners who have set up home in the Broch.  Alas, I got the impression that Derek didn’t want to be disturbed again just yet.  I also had plans for a series of brutal Lord of the Rings-esque tomes.  I decided that those epic tales should bake for a good while longer; my last foray into the realm of the fantastical did prove to be a fruitless slog.  I knew that if I was going to bother to write another book, and attempt to flog more of this shit to folk, then the story would have to be one that really held my interest.  It so happened that I found a tale worth telling, and it didn’t just materialise out of nothingness.  The spark for this book leapt from memory.

This is basically a true story.  The events that I aim to highlight in these pages happened in the eighties and involved some kids from my area who were six-eight years older than me.  It’s not a well-documented story, and one not easily googled; contradictory information has darkened the drama, and the mystery endures.  I hope that it will be a worthwhile venture to untangle the data and cleanse that clump of history.

Chapter 1

Probably the best place to start this story is in the back garden of a semi-detached house in Aberdeen, in a quiet and desirable area of the city.  This is not now; this is a dry Saturday afternoon in the summer of 1985. A lone boy digs a hole in the muck with a small shovel; he, a Kenneth Mackie, sports a t-shirt and shorts, which he is up to the waistband of in his self-made pit.  The grass has been lifted to make way for the slabs that are lined up against the side of the house; they are ready to be laid on the workmen’s return on the Monday.  From the viewpoint of the road, the Mackies reside in the left half of the building.  Kenneth is ten years old at this point; his parents have nipped out to inspect patio furniture.  His sole sibling, Angela, seven, is inside watching cartoons.  Kenneth’s mother, Karen, has allowed him to soil his garments; she is the receptionist at his father’s dental practice.  Mr Mackie bears the name Trevor.  The quartet are new to the neighbourhood; the boy has no friends nearby.  The exposed portions of his limbs have gained a dusty coat; a paste formed by the mixing of sweat and dirt clamps a brown thatch onto his scalp.  He digs as though there is some purpose to the exercise.  This is the past; I will modify the tense accordingly.

Kenneth had been out in the garden alone for almost an hour when his sister decided to join him; immediately, she conspired to get on his nerves.  The boy hoisted himself out of the crater; he planted his trainers upon the heaped soil and ordered his sister indoors. Angela did not comply but taunted him further.  The brother threatened to throw his shovel at her; she laughed.  With spade in hand, Kenneth sprinted at the girl; her joviality vanished.  She dashed past the slabs that reclined in the passageway, and he pursued her into the smaller front garden.  Angela continued out beyond the gate; she was hysterical.  The boy barked at his sister to halt; she did not.  Angela ran straight out onto the road, where her skull did then collide with the bonnet of a passing car.  She landed back beside the pavement.  The car did not stop; its licence plate number was noted by no one.  The seven-year-old was yanked into a coma.  Kenneth stood over her, and a group assembled around the pair.  Softly and repeatedly, the boy tapped his leg with the shovel.

Angela was whisked off in her slumber and wound into a cocoon of blankets and wires.  On the Sunday, Kenneth was dispatched to his dad’s brother’s house in the coastal village of Cairnbulg, with the proviso that he would be summoned back to the city when his sister had awakened and tempers had cooled.  Kenneth was dropped off by a friend of his father’s.  The boy wore the same khaki shorts as he’d done the previous day; the t-shirt had been swapped for a clean white one.  William Mackie, the uncle, was born in the forties, a year before Trevor was; he’d hurt his back in an incident aboard a fishing boat and hadn’t worked for a legitimate day’s pay since.  He left the driver to carry the boy’s duffel bag into the house, groaning to the man about his ailment.  William’s wife, Alison, had died of leukaemia when their only child, Cheryl, was four years old.  The girl was twelve the summer that her cousin came to stay with them.  Cheryl was taller then than Kenneth, and bigger even than some of the boys who would be heading into Fraserburgh Academy with her that August; she was not butch, though, but quite pretty. The long-haired brunette was moved by Kenneth’s arrival, having seen little of him prior to their living together; William did not drive, and Trevor didn’t savour the hangover smell of his brother’s abode enough to plan regular excursions to his former playground.  The chauffeur, attired more smartly than the uncle and with a much less frayed demeanour, did not stay for a drink; he passed on to William some money from Trevor and swiftly returned to Aberdeen.  The Mackie brothers were orphans, and Kenneth’s family on his mother’s side were mainly south of the border; the forty-some mile expanse between the village and the scene of Angela’s accident was thought by Kenneth’s folks to be a sufficiently large bandage.

William and his quine lived in a detached two-storey house, which he and Trevor had been raised in.  Their father had been a fisherman and their mother a housewife; those two had both expired in their sixties.  The robust house, a sculpted rock like its peers, sat a few rows up from the sea on Church Street, and it sits there still.  The front door points away from the water to a tarmac-free road; beyond that track is a well-kept park.  This tilted tract holds a Salvation Army building and, to the right of it from the Mackies’ perspective, Invercairn Court, the sheltered housing complex, which would have been a vast construction site that summer.  The vista ascends towards a proper road and more houses; behind those lies a defunct railway line, which is sensibly referred to as ‘the Line’. Farm land extends to the west of the Line; Rathen Road, which encompasses the last strip of Cairnbulg, hems the southern edge of a field.  Traversing Rathen Road will bring a body into Inverallochy, Cairnbulg’s conjoined twin, which has surpassed its brethren in scale since Kenneth’s sojourn, having expanded through a park towards the crossroads that’s over a mile from the Mackie house.  The two villages are collectively known as Belger.  As the railway line curves away from Cairnbulg in a north-western trajectory, it overlooks the bay; the greenery gives way to the dual grey digits of Belger harbour, the dark sea, an orange cuticle and, finally, the Broch.  Back then, the village harbour would have consisted of a solitary pier; it had yet to sprout its thumb.  Southwards, the Line slides a mile down the coast to the village of St Combs and to a stop; the track is grassy above Cairnbulg but barren below Inverallochy.

I have not been in the outwardly-symmetrical domicile that once housed the Mackies, but my research reveals that a staircase did confront a visitor when they entered via the front door.  To the right of the stairs on ground level, there was a utility room; access to the rear garden was available through there.  The living room occupied the bottom left section of the house.  A short corridor broke away from the lobby to the right; it travelled past the bathroom and into the kitchen and dining area.  There were two bedrooms upstairs, with one on either side of the landing.  William’s room was positioned directly above the lounge.  Kenneth would sleep in Cheryl’s chambers during his stay, while she would, initially at least, have to make do with a sleeping bag on the floor at the foot of her father’s bed; she had no problem with this arrangement.  William Mackie did not explain to his daughter the reasoning behind the allocation of sleeping quarters.  The interior of the home had a dour complexion; the carpets were combinations of reds and heavy browns, and varnish, wherever it had been required, had been slathered on by a trowel.  Furthermore, the Mackie house reeked due to William’s fondness for tobacco.  Neither of Kenneth’s parents smoked.

It was supper time when the dust had settled and Kenneth had set his things away into the provided cupboards.  William gave his daughter funds to purchase her and Kenneth’s meals from Peter’s, the chip shop that’s just along from that house on the section of the street where tarmac conceals the earth.  The shop exists today, although under new management; letters spelling out the original owner’s name remain on the facing above the door.  That shop used to belong to the family of a mate of mine, Bob Tait.  He and I are the same age, and we were in the same class until I moved to Fraserburgh with my family midway through my penultimate year of primary school education.  I did not like Bob initially, and I’m not sure why.  I remember him as he still is: slight frame; fair, curly hair; glasses; argumentative.  I don’t recall him having much of a sense of humour in those early days; I might have thought of him as being moany-faced and spoiled.  I picture him then as a prototype victim; a dweeb.  It may have seemed like too much effort to like him and simply more fun not to.  I tend to think of myself as being bullied more than being a bully growing up, but it’s possible that I was a shit to him, and to others.  He came up to school one dinner time with his eldest brother and a few older kids.  The group encircled me as I waited for the double doors to open and for school to recommence.  The elders encouraged Bob to inflict what must have been his revenge, and aided by another classmate – I think it was Alexander Stephen – he proceeded to blitz my legs with kicks.  I stood there a frightened, sobbing mess, offering no resistance.  I believe that our teacher even sided with Bob over the incident; she pretty much insisted that I’d had it coming.  Somehow, I warmed to him by the time that I left Belger at the age of eleven.  Bob is the chief electrician for the night crew aboard a drillship; he’s married with two young boys and resides in the Inverallochy side of the village.  Through childhood, he and I lived along from each other in Cairnbulg, right at the shore front.  His wife’s brother was in my primary seven class, and her sister was a cleaner at the Tescos where I work.  Bob’s dad’s dad – his didie – used to run Peter’s, and the shop is more commonly referred to by his byname: Bomber.  Kenneth Mackie opted not to escort his cousin to that chippers; his uncle didn’t pester him for words, and the man beseeched Cheryl to handle their guest with similar restraint.  William didn’t wait for his daughter to return from Bomber’s; he caught a bus into town.  Cheryl found the boy fully clothed and asleep on her bed in a bright room with the curtains open.

Chapter 2

I know these things about Kenneth and his situation because of Cheryl.  She is alive and a mother and virtually divorced.  Her last name is presently Campbell; she married a car mechanic before she was even in her twenties.  Cheryl is not that far from forty.  She lives in Fraserburgh with her two kids, a boy and a girl, who are both of academy age.  Cheryl did some secretarial work at the garage where the father of her children was employed before he left to pursue a career offshore; amid some controversy, she posted her notice soon after he did.  She stacks shelves through the night in the same vast shop where I am, for twenty-odd hours of the week, the backdoor man.  This is how I became truly acquainted with her.

I remember Cheryl, but I did not know her.  I was four years old when these things were happening in my village.  She was never at the same school at the same time as me at any point.  I did, though, recognise her when our paths crossed in the store.  Cheryl keeps her brown hair shorter than she did as a young quine, and her figure has inevitably swelled.  She has a big frame; however, I wouldn’t dismiss her as being a fatty.  She remains tall as females go.  I finish at ten pm on Friday and Saturday, just as she is about to start; I pass her on Monday and Tuesday mornings as I’m clocking in.  There is some overlap, and this is when I have had the opportunity to query her in regards to the specifics of what occurred between her, Kenneth and the rest of their gang.  Initially, I had no interest in Cheryl, as I have little interest in co-workers in general.  It was only when the idea for this novel began to itch that I reasoned that a relationship needed to be forged.  The fact that I, too, am ex-Belger eased the interrogation process.  Cheryl didn’t know who I was, and hadn’t heard of Liquid Kids, but she could recall my older brothers, specifically Paul, the eldest.  I broached the subject of lineage to form a bond with her then in quiet moments in the canteen, or when she’s been passing through my warehouse, I’ve pressed deeper.  Cheryl has been very helpful with the compiling of facts for this book, and it is my hope that she won’t be disappointed, or very offended, by how this project turns out.  It would be quite inconvenient if upon the publication of this tome she should think to sue me for the nothing that I have.  Cheryl did say that she’s sick of her job and isn’t worried if some of the revelations that will be presented in this text might compromise her position within the Tesco family, and that is a plus.  Similarly, I couldn’t give much of a fuck at this point either.

In Cairnbulg and long ago, Kenneth slept through to the Monday and woke up hungry.  He ate his fish supper cold, and then he waited for his uncle and cousin to rise.  Cheryl stirred before her father did; he wouldn’t emerge from his pit until the thick of the afternoon.  That summer, the girl predominantly wore a long, blue skirt and a white collared t-shirt, which was accompanied by a lilac blouse when there was a tad too much chill in the air; she had a pair of white trainers that weren’t of a brand worth boasting about.  It is safe to assume that she was dressed thusly, albeit minus the blouse perhaps, when she suggested to her cousin that they should make the most of a sunny day.  Kenneth hadn’t come equipped with many changes of costume either; he had the one pair of trainers, which were black and did have a recognisable emblem, although he lacked the requisite dark socks to blend with those shoes.  In his bag upstairs, he had some additional underwear and a couple more t-shirts; he also had a grey jumper and a pair of polyester-woven tracksuit bottoms of a navy persuasion.  Plus, just in case, Kenneth had with him a blue waterproof jacket.  He was wearing the shorts and t-shirt that he’d arrived in when he accepted Cheryl’s invitation to go outdoors.  She took him down to the shore.

I used to live in a large, white house, above where this pair likely explored.  The rocks parted to create a natural berth, which my dad had claimed for his yawl.  My dad has been a self-employed joiner for the duration of my existence; when we were Belgers, he used to take us out on summer evenings in a wee craft to fish for bait and drop creels.  For many years after our move to the Broch, I wasn’t out upon the sea; that was until a pal of mine, Daniel Miller, purchased a sailing boat.  Big Dan might have accidentally snapped a few telephone lines towing his vessel to the harbour, and I may have been in the car tailing him and been witness to his mast buckling under the strain of an especially stubborn wire.  However, that boat did make it to the water one day, and I accompanied Daniel out there for an afternoon.  We did, of course, misjudge the tide and were beached for a while on our return to port.  He has since sold the ship.  Daniel was a senior project engineer at a revered company within the energy industry, although now I believe he works for an agency.  He has his own bachelor pad in Aberdeen, and I don’t see that much of him.  He’s probably slamming his giant nuts against some French dame at a European music festival.  Dan’s a year younger than me; he grew up on my street, just past my granny and didie’s house – grandparents on my father’s side.  My dad used to fear for the hull of his vessel and would reprimand kids who cluttered the furrow at the foot of our house; Cheryl says that she wis once tellt aff fir skimmin’ steens doon ’ere.  The Buchan yawl, for the most part, sat on its trailer by our garage door.  Between our former home and the shore, there is a tight road and a strip of grass, upon which there are posts for hanging out wet clothes; also, there’s the rusty stump of what had been my dad’s winch.  A pebbled verge meets the rock pools and the North Sea.  Sometimes, on wilder days, the waves hurl forests of kelp onto the road.  After his mother’s funeral, my dad confessed to a room that the reason he moved us all to Fraserburgh was that he’d been tormented at night by the thought of the water reaching out further and further to consume us.  The house has not as yet been supplanted by the sea.

Cheryl and Kenneth spent their Monday morning below my windows investigating what was uncovered by the retreating tide.  She recalls there being other kids at play down there; I might well have been one of them.  That area was a lot busier when I was a bairn, and many people, Cheryl included, have noticed this.  We had computer games back then as well, but I suppose that technical limitations dictated that our Pong 2.0 offerings weren’t as time-consuming as the next generation’s vir-sim portals.  The Mackies worked their way north along the band of firm, jagged terrain towards the harbour.  The rocks flick out sharply just before the coast swings westwards; a beacon stands at the tip of this out-stretched arm.  Kenneth, warming to the locale, suggested that they venture out to that tower and ascend it.  Cheryl was game for anything that he had in mind; she didn’t really gel with the other girls in her age group and tended to spend a good portion of her free time alone.  The cousins headed towards the spike.  The sun vanquished much of the slime from the greener parts of the landscape; grip wasn’t a substantial issue.  The youngsters, though, had to be mindful of following their feet into puddles; a hyper alertness is key to navigating these rocks at speed.  The boy led them to a sandy gap halfway to the beacon; this is the Troch, and excitedly they crossed it.  The harbour was around the corner behind them; a handful of spectators eyed their progress from the pier.  Seals basking on slabs howled at the approaching humans.  The pools became vaster as the cousins neared the base of their target; Kenneth speculated as to what could be lurking among the swathes of seaweed and spoke of lobsters with pincers so great that they could slice a man in two.  Cheryl marvelled at the beauty of the seals as they slipped one by one back into the sea; birds squawked then, too, fled.  The youths reached their destination; the boy said that the red metal structure was like the skeleton of some Dalek god.  Kenneth was the first to clamber up the ladder that’s attached to the beacon; he beckoned his cousin upwards.  Cheryl says that she bruised her knee on one of the steps.  The Mackies stood together about fifteen feet up on a circular platform in front of a shielded bulb, and for a long while they gazed in all directions.  During this period, Cheryl asked Kenneth what he’d been digging for in his garden, but he would not tell her.  Kenneth was impressed by the outline of the Broch at the far end of a curve; he compared it to a multitude of indented, lethal things.  He became enthused by the idea that the brae to the left of it, Tiger Hill, was a button that when activated caused the town to flip right over and crush its prey.  Eventually, Kenneth initiated their descent down the ladder.

The Mackies discovered that the water had crept back in as they’d been studying their surroundings from above; the burst of beach midway between the beacon and land had become submerged.  Kenneth tested the depth of the Troch with a stone; neither child was an overly confident swimmer.  The seals congregated like fluctuating bollards on either side of the crag.  The kids removed their footwear; figures watched them from the harbour wall. Kenneth pulled the front of his shorts upwards with the hand that didn’t carry his socks and trainers; Cheryl twisted the hem of her skirt into a ball.  The pair stepped out into the channel.  The girl’s skirt got drenched; the boy was soaked up to his bellybutton.  The water rose; the current tugged at weak legs.  Cheryl trod in a pit and yelped.  The duo made it across; they did not complain about the experience.  The harbour crowd dissipated.

Kenneth said that Cheryl should tell her dad that they got wet falling into a puddle, as opposed to jumping into the sea; he specified that he’d gone in first and had grabbed her, without malice, in an attempt to save himself.  She stated that they would need no excuse and that they’d probably hiv dried afore they got hame onywye.  The sharpness of the rocks and of the barnacles that clung to them prompted the duo, post haste, to strap their feet back into their designated holsters; the cousins then lurched towards the shore.  Two boys with bikes observed them from the feral grass south of the pier; their stature suggested that they were not quite teens.  As the Mackies approached land, they saw the pair lay down their vehicles and make for the pebbles.  The boys’ faces were yet smudges when they began to fling stones at Cheryl and Kenneth.  The missiles were launched upwards rather than being whipped horizontally and so tumbled down in an arc that at least gave the cousins a second to lunge from trouble.  The Mackies halted in front of a pool; the boys realigned their sites to aim for that body of water, and they rejoiced whenever a throw resulted in either of the already wet pair being splashed.  No adults were in the vicinity to impede this assault; the bulk of Cairnbulg ends well enough away from this particular spot, and the singular dwelling that sits out there on the corner, with as good a view as any in the country, did not stir.  A projectile ricocheted off the terrain and clipped Cheryl’s shin; she gasped when the blood appeared, and Kenneth produced a sound that could have been construed as an involuntary shriek for mercy.  The bombardment stopped.  The boys scurried off back to their bikes and then hooted as they bolted into the village.

Cheryl and Kenneth were not deflated by the episode, but rather they were mildly elated to have survived the dual tribulations of the Troch and the stoning.  It was early evening when the bedraggled pair arrived back at the house, and Kenneth had several stories cued up to explain their sorry state, although none was required.  The father had left a note to say that he’d had to bus it into town; the message was accompanied by some money for food.  The cousins changed into dry clothes; their moist counterparts were hung out in the back garden for the last of the sun to contend with.  When the pair visited the living room, she asked him what he wanted for his supper.  The boy said that he wasn’t sure; he’d like to go to the shop with her to see for himself.  His eagerness, however, subsided when exterior sounds drew him to the window.  Across from the Mackie abode, and within the building site that workmen had newly abandoned for the day, two boys ran amok.  Their bikes were heaped on the grass.  Cheryl inquired if Kenneth would prefer that she jist maak ’im somethin’ instead.  He replied with a nod.

Chapter 3

Belgers do, or certainly did, refer to going down to the rocks as ‘gan doon the wrack’, which probably relates to the literal picture of the seaweed that’s washed ashore, rather than the more poetic notions conjured by the various definitions of ‘rack’.  Furthermore, to venture over the uncultivated landscape behind the beach is known as ‘gan o’er the bents’; that moniker most likely pertains to the curved blades that bind the mounds together.  The term ‘bents’, as it will be used in this book, describes an area of sand dunes that has developed a green hide.  Growing up, I was either doon the wrack or o’er the bents; I’d have been collecting small crabs in a pail or hurtlin’ doon grite muckle sanny braes.  I would have engaged in these activities with whichever of my contemporaries appeared at my door or happened to be around; nothing could have been all that well organised before texting.  Prior to starting school, and also during the majority of the summer months, my best friends were the kids that lived nearest to me.

The day after their adventures out at the beacon, Cheryl asked her cousin if he’d like tae ging o’er the bents.  After explaining to him what this meant, as she would have had to have done with a number of Belger expressions, Kenneth responded in the positive.  Their clothes had dried and were fit to be worn.  Cheryl fixed them a picnic, which she carried in a peach-coloured backpack, and they set off towards the bents. The kids took the harbour route; alternatively, they could have crossed the grass by the building site and travelled along the railway line, passing the twin chicken sheds that lie parallel to each other south of the track and cutting down from there.  However, the Aberdonian enjoyed being close to the sea and opted to have it by his side; the briny tang, diluted in the city, invigorated him.

The pier’s about half a mile from the Mackie house.  Connecting Belger to the harbour, there’s a single-track road, which might have been mud then but is tarmac now; clumps of bending needles border this route.  The beacon’s multiple ankles were engulfed that morning; Kenneth commented about how cool it would be if that torch just bobbed away and was snatched by a gigantic eagle.  Little boats freed themselves from the pier and steered their passengers out onto the sparkling bay.  The cousins ambled west of the harbour, following a path adjacent to the shore.  This track ends, spilling out onto the mixture of rubble and jetsam that hems the beach at the Belger side of the Philorth River; the clutter stretches as far as a pillbox, which signals the beginning of marshlands.  A couple of miles prise the Philorth from Fraserburgh; the sea has fashioned a splendid ridge with a swipe of its claw.  To advance beyond the river, one must remove whatever might be on their feet, and possibly even their jeans; if that isn’t to your liking, or if the river’s swelled up just a tad too much, there is a bridge, although it’s nowhere in sight of the beach, and, what’s more, you’ll be sharing it with roaring motors.  There is talk of a footbridge being constructed down there at the Waters of Philorth, but it is a conversation that ignites and fades in predictable cycles.  That bridge is a thing that should always have been in existence, and yet, as I tap these keys, still does not.

I’ve walked to Belger beach from the Broch over a hundred times and about the only person I ever see down there is my chum John McLean’s dad, Graeme, out walking his dogs.  It is a neglected spot, even though it does look dirtier than it seemed to have been in my youth; this applies also to Cotton beach at the other side of the village.  I would picnic down at the Philorth with my mum and brothers whenever summer lived up to its potential; others would be there too.  We would dig for liquid and bury bodies, and pursue flatfish in the limpid water.  Cheryl recalls that there were women and children on blankets beside hampers that Tuesday.  She and Kenneth did not tarry there where the path veers into the sand; they ventured upwards to examine the peaks and troughs of the bents.  The duo entered this domain by hiking over a downed segment of barbed wire fencing.

The bents behind Cairnbulg beach is sort of like a deformed egg carton, adorned with the pelt of a hedgehog.  There are many narrow paths within the bents, which are rarely visible until you are on them; the blades that coat the area bully ramblers