The Press and Journal (Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire)
SANDHAVEN AND PITTULIE
In the 1960s and 70s, Cuthbert Graham wrote This Is My Country, a weekly travel column in the Press and Journal. Here, we have reprinted his delightful musings from 1963, for you to enjoy
Sandhaven and Pittulie Beyond the Phingask Shore, Whaur clean wind sweeps ayont the lums And muckle breakers roar.
Sandhaven and Pittulie – They make a bonnie pair; Ane wi’ aul’ farrant gable-eyns, The tither spruce an’ fair.
Tho’ noo the herrin’ days are deen An’ the herbour lies a’ teem an’ lane, San’haven skill Is a byword still And the boats she makes are a seaman’s dream.
Emerging from the north-western corner of Fraserburgh and passing the Clubbie Craig and the hamlet of Broadsea, one comes in sight of a long, deeply-curving bay, by the verge of which the road along the coast hugs the Phingask Shore.
Across this bay with its golden sands, and occasional low, dark fangs of rock, one sees beyond the turbulence of white horses racing to the beach the projecting line of the village of Sandhaven.
At this point Sandhaven’s twin, the older village of Pittulie, is not visible, and the effect is of a modern township; perhaps one may think of it as a dormitory suburb of Fraserburgh, with its many fine recently-erected county council houses, for Sandhaven is expanding rapidly and is an attractive building site because of its more-thanample water supply.
But a closer inspection alters this impression of unblushing modernity. On the very outskirts of the village is an old meal mill, with its adjoining croft carved out of the farm of Mains of Pittendrum, a mill which still produces the finest quality of oats.
Opposite the mill is the great empty expanse of Sandhaven Harbour – at this time of the year utterly desolate and innocent of craft, either for business or pleasure – a harbour that was dreamed about for centuries before it was actually built in 1830 by Sir John Forbes of Pitsligo and the Fishery Board, at a cost of £4,205, and has seen many busy days before falling upon its present-day neglect.
And then as one passes through the village and turns the corner beyond the Church and the Hall into Pittulie one is transported into another era by the genuinely antique. Here are old-time fisher cottages with their low tiled roofs and gableends facing the street. The long history of the fishing community is present here in stone and lime.
It is just as well to take a good look at it, for according to what I was told there is a tendency to abandon the old fisher but-and-bens of Pittulie for the new houses of Sandhaven, although the Third Statistical Account of the parish records that many of the Pittulie houses have been successfully modernised.
I would be sorry to see all the picturesque tiled cottages of Pittulie disappear. They are, I am sure, capable of internal modernisation without losing all their old-world character. They were built to endure the buffetings of centuries, presenting the least surface to the impact of the winds from the seas, and they have at any rate survived the worst that the Great Gale could do in 1953 – and that was a pretty severe test, when fish were blown out of the sea and landed up in the school playground.
Unless one keeps one’s eyes skinned one can pass right through Sandhaven and Pittulie without noticing the most important feature of the present-day community, the boat-buildings yard of J. and G. Forbes, a century-old institution which was never more vital than it is at the present moment.
Except when a boat is to be launched the work here is all under cover and it is an astonishing experience to pass out of the empty street into the two great sheds, where every inch of space seems occupied by craft under construction. At the present time eight craft are being built by the 48 highly-skilled craftsmen at work in this famous yard.
Three of them are 42ft cabin cruisers of the Kemrock class, recently described in the national press, reporting on the Earls Court Boat Show, as a “dream boat.”
It is a splendid testimony to the traditional skill of the Sandhaven boatbuilders that it has been able to turn from the old staple of fishing-boat building to this “luxury” line with tri-
umphant success, at a time when the brake has been applied to the white fish industry so far as new construction is concerned.
Also being completed at the yard at present are a 54ft fishing boat for St Ives in Cornwall, a harbour launch for the Dover Harbour Board and two more fishing vessels of 30ft and 28ft respectively.
Since 1961 the Sandhaven products have been represented at the Boat Show and have attracted the delighted interest of sailing enthusiasts. “What we would like to do now is build a pure yacht type,” I was told.
The population of Sandhaven and Pittulie today, well over 600, is greater than it ever was in the past.
But there must have been a very remote period when great bodies of men converged on this exposed part of the Buchan coast, perhaps in bloody conflict, and left their kinsmen to lie on the Muir of Pittendrum, as it then was, in multitudes of cairns.
It is all conjecture now, because the plough and the hands of long-dead investigators have removed the traces of this mass burial that were once so abundant.
The farther back one goes in written record the more one learns about this battlefield-cum-graveyard. Mr Patrick Cook, who wrote an account for the parish of Pitsligo in 1723 has much to say about it.
“Among the sands,” he tells us, “have been found a great many dead bodies carefully buried, with large stones placed beneath, at the sides and above each body which have served them for coffins. It is not 12 years since some of the graves were raised and all the bones were lying in their natural order.
“This place is called by the country people Wallace Howe, as if he had fought a battle there; but this conjecture seems to be without ground, since no history tells us of his having been so far north. It appears more probable that when the Danes were defeated at Cruden, they made their retreat this way, with a design to recover their ships or to join their countrymen in Moray – either of which the Scots would cer- tainly endeavour to prevent. And ’tis not unlike they might have a skirmish here, where the sea would hinder the further flight of the Danes...
“This conjecture,” went on the voluble Mr Cook, “is the more to be regarded that there is a pretty large muir on Pittendrum in this parish, a mile to the south-eat of the House of Pittulie, in which there are a great many small cairns about twice the length and breadth of a man’s body – and at the east end of the muir, the large cairn... There is another large cairn near a mile west from the Muir, and a third half a mile west of that.”
To Mr Cook’s mind there was every reason to link all this with the Cairns of Memsie in the next parish and to imagine the Danes making a fighting retreat to the north-west which gave them the opportunity to bury their dead with ceremony as they went.
This very plausible theory suffers from the fact that nowadays the Cairns of Memsie are no longer associated, either with the “Danes” or the Norsemen, but with an even earlier period.