From the glittering rays of sunrise over an airless horizon throwing sparkling lights across the sea to the shore, to the moonlit rippling of the surface on a dark winter’s night interrupted only by the regular sweep of the lighthouse beam and the twinkling ships’ lights, the sea was a comforting partner to our island community. It was our umbilical cord to the mainland....

I have four granddaughters: two now adult, two aged 11 and 8. I often had them for ‘sleepovers’ and of course at bedtime they always wanted a story. They did not want any story from a book – they had heard them all before, so I had to make one up – the favourite being about a dolphin. Living on the sea front the children spent all summer on the beach ...

I miss the lighthouse. The building still stands up on the Braehead but its light has gone. There’s no sudden ray to spotlight my dog as we walk the Links on winter nights. No beam lights up a segment of the Firth and there’s no longer an answer from far-off Covesea. Times change and so does technology but the new brighter buoys, flashing harsh red and green, seem poor substitutes...

When I was small, living in the Kyles of Bute, the sea was a positive and comforting factor in our upbringing. We sometimes sailed down from Glasgow on the Jeanie Deans, one of the last paddle steamers. I remember being taken down into the engine room and watching in awe as these huge gleaming pistons pumped up and down....

Each year The Cromarty Arts Trust provides month-long residencies for artists to live and work in the community. In 2006 Cromarty was privileged to welcome Hanna Tuulikki, whose project ‘Airs of the Sea’ chimed with the aims of our 2007 project. Here are some extracts from her project diary. …This afternoon I walked to the top of the hill they call The Sutor. ...

During my life I have never lived far from the sea. I was born near St Andrews and spent my childhood, after a brief spell in Cupar, Fife, in Montrose. Memories of beach walks along the Angus coastline remain strong, whatever the season. In my teenage years my family moved north to Saltburn near Invergordon, and the sound of the sea filled my ears and my moods changed with the tides....

I was born in Fochabers and although not living close by the sea we were always aware of it being not very far away – only a matter of a few miles as the crow flies. Fochabers nestles in a hollow, and so to enjoy the many beautiful walks surrounding it you have to climb to the higher ground and no matter what direction your walk takes you, be it through the forests or up on the moorland ...

I’m standing on the raised beach, idly watching a family of three small girls playing excitedly on the sandy shore. Barefoot, they run up and down to the distant waves, their long hair streaming behind them, their shouts and cries carried to me on the breeze. Half close my eyes and I’m transported back more than fifty years. I’m on holiday in Donegal, Ireland,...

It was something of a shock to be informed that the area just outside our house had been chosen as the site for the new sewage pumping station. Since 2004 this site has handled – if that is the proper word – the bulk of the raw sewage load from the town and pumps it out to the treatment plant at the Targets. When the project was carried out we were more than a little dismayed ...

The sea – cold, wet, salty. But not as mucky as it was pre-sewage plant. Beachcombing is nicer without the ‘thingies’. No more does the sea gurgle and slurp beneath the big slab in my garden. Those old pipes connect to the new pump. The sounds of the sea whispering and roaring and its colours are uncountable. I wish I’d kept a diary for the last 19 years....

At Navity I overlook the Moray Firth and the ever-changing sea and sky never fails to delight. Both in the morning and in the evening at sunrise and sunset it is almost like a picture by Turner, and the colours in the clouds outdo any spectacle in the theatre or cinema. To walk along the shore provides an unending variety of seabirds and occasional glimpses of dolphins add to the interest. ...

What is it about that blue, grey or green sheet, sometimes silky-smooth, sometimes crumpled, often stretching to a horizontal line at infinity, that I find so beguiling? Growing up in a landlocked part of the outer London sprawl means that it’s not ingrained from youth. Indeed, childhood visits to the seaside were very rare, but even then I remember the thrill of that first glimpse of ‘the blue line’...

I was brought up within a stone’s throw of the sea. I used to delight in doing just that from our small garden, occasionally to the consternation of our immediate neighbour whose roof I sometimes threw the stones over! There were many in the community who relied directly or indirectly on the sea to provide employment. ...

The Hen Harrier was almost new. Made of white pine planks on larch frames, she was the penultimate Greencastle skiff built by the late Gilbert Clark of Port Charlotte, Islay. She was 24 feet long with a sharp stern, light but strong, a craft of great beauty built by an extraordinary man using the materials he cut from ‘bends’ sent from forests on the mainland and planks prepared in his...

The Cromarty Boat Club's 'Commodore's Cruise' which I introduced a couple of years after the club was formed in 1996 has been increasing in popularity every year. The success of the 2002 trip through the Caledonian Canal to the West Coast strengthened my resolve to go for Orkney in 2003. A meeting was called in January and nine boat owners agreed it was Orkney or Bust!...

Whenever I walk the shores of Cromarty, I cannot help seeing them through the eyes of Hugh Miller, having become immersed in his sea stories almost as soon as my wife Frieda and I arrived here fifteen years ago to look after his museum. And I thrill to see how our young people enjoy many of the same adventures as did the boy daredevil Hugh. ...