The Torry Coo

Reasonable work day today , trying to organise everyone for the mad dash to Christmas after the tattie holidays.

The Torry Coo has been sold, so I read in the Press and Journal.
Goodness knows what the new owner is going to do with it.
A small concrete shed, presumably filled with an engine, two large storage tanks
for the compressor and the horn itself. I decided I should nip out and blip this landmark, that I pass every time I drive Greyhope Road, in search of a harbour photograph.

I remember the booming restful sound of this beast, echoing through the haar as I drifted off to sleep in the early years when I first moved to Aberdeen.

'Compressed air escapes from tanks into the perforated siren,
while it rotates and there are thus produced every two minutes
four blasts-two high and two low notes.
Sadly the horn has not sounded since the late 1980s,

As it and all others in Scotland were shut off by the Northern Lighthouse Board, modern ships were thought to be too large and enclosed for the captain to hear a fog signal.

The sound of our Torry Coo not only resembled the bovine braying, but to a legendary sea monster that lived in Greyhope Bay it sounded just like a male of her species. The story goes that she cried back to the fog horn's sound, thinking it was a potential mate, yet was eternally disappointed as although she heard the returning call, she could never find her handsome male monster!

Ships today are full of technical wizardry which have made the Coo and her 'herd' obsolete, but you never know when we will need them again!