I'm a sucker for vanished villages, sunken cities, and the like. So, when I heard the legend of Forvie Sands I felt the spirit of Indiana Jones rise in my soul.
Forvie lies on the Aberdeenshire coast between the community Newburgh and the village of Collieston. It is an amazing place and I'm convinced the desert dune scenes in that classic war movie Ice Cold in Alex must have been filmed there.
Forvie is the least disturbed sand dune system in Britain. It has the largest colony of eider ducks in Britain, is one of the best examples of coastal heathland in Scotland, and the huge amounts of sand come from glacial and outwash deposits exposed by falling sea levels. It is, of course, a wildlife paradise. All this is according to Scottish National Heritage which has a management agreement with local landowners for the four-mile long sands.
According to tradition, a nine-day storm covered the parish of Forvie, burying traces of settlement dating back to the bronze age. At Rockend a medieval community was overwhelmed, although still visible is the twelfth-century Forvie kirk.
SNH reckons dunes were present in the south of the district 2000 years ago but the sand moved north and reached Collieston by 1759. In 1570 a Reforming preacher called
Masson mentions the disappearance of Forvie parish beneath the sands, adding that this judgment came about because the folk of Forvie were papists and grossly ignorant.
The legendary version is, as ever, more interesting. Supposedly three daughters inherited the land but through violence and dirty dealing were cheated out of their inheritance. In a curse worthy of Macbeth's team of witches they prayed to heaven for the land to be made worthless. This prayer concluded:
Let nocht bee funde in Furvye's glebys
Bot thystl, bente and sande.
Now, you have to say, that was one successful curse.
What holds my attention at Forvie is the changing attitude towards this special place over the past two centuries. In Aberdeen Central Library I found an article which appeared in the Aberdeen Magazine in May 1832 after the anonymous author visited magical Forvie.
''The scene was more in accordance with the desolation of an African wilderness than the blue hills and green valleys of my native Caledonia. No trace of human habitation could be seen. Huge piles of driven sand, stretching for miles in every direction, presenting no vestiges of life or vegetation but the bent under our feet and, it may be, a stray seagull over our head . . . a loneliness and desolation of the vast Zahara.''
The truth is the place is, and always has been, teeming with life from sand-burrowing shrimps in the estuary, providing food for birds and fish to the 348 species of flowering plant. There are hundreds of species of butterflies and moths and dozens of species of birds.
Certainly, it's missing a resident human population these days. But I wonder if it's any the worse for that.
