Crovie

This is Crovie, a tiny Hamlet, seemingly lost in time, on the Moray Firth coast, east of Banff.
It consists of a huddle of houses sheltered under a hilly cliff and fronting directly on to the sea. It is accessed by a steep single track road to a parking spot and then by a footpath which runs along the sea wall, connecting all the houses.

There is nothing here but the sea and the birds: no television, no telephone, no internet, no shop and the only contact with the outside world is via that road with an incline of 17.5%.

It was built in the eighteenth century by the land owners to house people from the highland clearances who could no longer farm their land, but could perhaps make a living from fishing.
It existed as a tiny fishing port until 1953, but is now mainly the domicile of holiday folk and artists who come to live here in the summer, although there are one or two stalwarts living permanently.

We parked our car at the top of the road and walked down into utter tranquility and silence.
The resident cormorant was perched on a rock in the sea and the seagulls were hunkered down on the shore. A skein of geese flew south overhead, so high that we heard nothing of their calling.

The sea was in gentle mood today, sheltered by the bay from the south west wind; I can imagine how frightening it would be to have an angry sea with waves lashing feet from your front door.

We only saw three people on our travels, including a delivery man who was humping a huge parcel from where he could park his van at the end of the road along the cobbled path to deliver it.

The life in this little fishing port in the eighteenth century must have been hard. From toiling in the fields for little reward, they had to learn to fish and support themselves in a completely new way.

I daresay they weren't quite so struck by the beauty of the place as were we.