31 Crovie, Banff, 22nd September 1993
A dour day dawned with distant leaden cliffs beyond a sullenly unwelcoming sea. After breakfast we walked round the bay to Gardenstown – an easy well-made path, then across a stretch of beach by flat beds of red stone veined with cream and picked over by turnstones and hooded crows. The village, it’s no more despite the name, was founded in 1720 by Alexander Garden and a fishing community developed around the harbour.
We climbed a grassy valley up to the Church of St John the Evangelist. Built in 1513, it celebrated the defeat of the Danes here in 1004 in the Battle of the Bloody Pits, but is now roofless and ruined in a field of graves all circumscribed by a stone wall. The clear lettering on the stones suggests a prosperous community – fish curer, watchmaker, shoemaker – and gives the regular litany of early deaths and occasional longevity spanning periods of enormous change. Bells, coffins, hour glasses and skulls and cross bones are the iconography of death.
Down below the boats sat quietly in the harbour and the village slept in overcast picture postcard ease with Crovie hugging the shore back across the water. On the way home we stopped at the bakers to buy bread for lunch. A hand written sign in the window advertised an Anne Summers lingerie party.