From the forest cloak of the Grey Mountains, across the high black bog of Daviot, the river Nairn drops tumbling to the shadows behind Culloden, past Cawdor Castle of fickle fortune, and on to the open strath, where it seems to repent its impetuosity and saunters into the little town of Nairn – where everybody saunters.
The town lies with a crook in its elbow; the chief street, with its prim buildings and unexpected ancient gateways, turns suddenly to the right, ignoring the narrower way that leads to little cottages, to blue jerseyed folk, to boats, to man-made ramparts against the thunder and fling of northern seas. Silently, during hundreds of years, the estuary has changed its position; with the result that under the tossing waves of the bay lies what may be left of the ancient castle; the submerged “tangle” heaped upon its fallen battlements and the dangerous undercurrents swirling and moaning through its green-lit dungeons.
This is an unstable coastline. Sea, river and sand have shifted in short space of time, and the latter, in league with the De’il, has created one of the strangest sights in Scotland – the Culbin Sands. Lonelier than a cloudless sky, deserted even by the gulls, wrapped in an awful silence broken only by the serpent hiss of the wind among the stinging grains, this little Egypt lies, the punishment of a local Pharaoh. Beneath your shoes as they fill at every step, buried under the sliding sand, lie orchards, crofts, sixteen farms with fields and the plough in the furrow and the great Manor House, with its gardens and dovecot; for the Barony of Culbin (so prosperous that it was known as The Granary of Moray), was sand-covered in a night of terrific gale. Some years ago, after a storm, the tip of an apple tree was disclosed and veritably made the desert to blossom, and the main chimney of the Manor stood out stark and grotesque in the surrounding silence. Next day a contrary wind hid once again all signs of habitation.
Along this lovely coast, edifices project from the Sands of Time. One such is Kinloss Abbey, a barren ruin to the sky, in whose roofless walls ancient and modern tombstones jostle in the lush grass, replacing the paintings, books, the silken beds, the tapestries and carving which made the monastery a famous guesthouse in the 12th century.
Moray folk, when they come down from the hills to the plain, hide form the sea expanse and its distant view of the towering giants of Ross, and cuddle the bowls where Nature seems to have conserved some saintly comfort amongst young streams and flowered meadows. In such a place the town of Elgin lies, the gaunt ribs and arches of the great Cathedral etched black against the evening sky.
Today the paved market space in the centre of the Main Street is no longer the centre of colourful booths or gossiping crowds. It is a solemn grey town containing a douce people, and one feels that when the sea receded from the northern flats beyond the town it must have taken with it something besides the hearty salt tang, the clatter of the fisher folk, the gaiety of tartan shawls. There is a sadness even over those drained fields of Spynie, but the journey is worth it to stand on the grass, under the solidarity of Spynie palace, and conjure up the boats that used to flit under its windows.
Towards the south is another land; where hills, heather-clad in summer, run down to melt into rough grazing, to corn-land and croft, to be suddenly embroidered at the road edge with ragged-robin, meadow-sweet, blue gentian, forget-me-not and golden lady’s straw. Amongst these hills, and surging up their sides like a weighty sea, run the forests. In summer the forests are an ocean of fragrance, inhabited by a million enamelled tits pouring their filigree music through the bold pattern of the varnished foliage. In winter a world utterly silent, so amazing as to appear newly conceived in a mind minus colour; a muffled unreality, pure white from the tips of the thickly coated Douglas firs to the un-detailed plane of the buried blueberry bushes.
In the centre of this mountain land lies deserted Loch an Dorb, where the hoody crow chuckles upon the island ruins of the Wolf’s castle, and from there down the corries to the battleground of Dunphail, by the happy grain lands, by Darnway of the dark secret and on to the long sands and stretching sea, live a people of character; combining the romance of the Highlander with the reliability of the Lowlander to the making of that distinction . . . the Men o’ Moray.