Lighthouse sunset

©Calum Davidson

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 of course and so does technology but the new brighter buoys, flashing harsh red and green, seem poor substitutes. The Cromarty light was one link in the chain of Stevenson lights guarding the Scottish coastline. When we moved here from the Hebrides it offered a familiar landmark: small, sturdy and reassuring just like the one we’d left by Lochindaal in Islay.

Our twenty-five years of living by the Fishertown shore have seen other changes too. In north-easterly gales the rollers no longer pound the vertical seawall sending terrifying judders through Shore Street and up the Vennels. The bouldered sea-defences may not be beautiful but they’ve proved their worth. Our seaward gable once needed a protective storm shutter – not any more. Nor do spray and seaweed hit our first floor bedroom window. Best of all, the house itself has stopped shaking.

The landscape’s different too. The telegraph poles have gone; the sewage pipes have been replaced by a massive concrete pumping station. Over at Nigg sections of rigs have given way to windmills. We’ve been here long enough to remember a time before the long jetty, before the tankers came with their lights and the night-time hum of machinery.

But in spite of the changes much remains the same. There’s a constancy about the sea itself. The sounds of waves on shingle seem more natural now than silence. The late Robert Hendry told a story about Cromarty recruits to a Highland regiment. Billeted in an inland barracks, the Cromarty boys were unable to sleep for three nights until a sergeant (a Black Isle man himself) suggested throwing buckets of water at the barracks windows. According to Robert it worked. Back then we laughed at that story. Not now.

On maps and charts the distance between our shore and the North Sutor remains constant. Yet weather and conditions often suggest otherwise. Some mornings we wake to the foghorns of tugs or barges and can’t even see the opposite shoreline. At other times with sunlight picking out individual sheep and yellow gorse clumps the Sutor seems to have shifted southwards in some bizarre game of Grandmother’s Footsteps.

The goldeneyes no longer return to the sewer pipe each winter but the grey herons still stand by the burn mouth and the gulls are bolder than ever. We see dolphins less often nowadays so their rare appearances seem all the more special. And just once, near midnight in late June seventeen years ago, I saw an otter hunch his unhurried way down the sand to melt into the shallows…

A telescope and binoculars stand by the window. Our passing traffic goes by water: yachts, dinghies and kayaks, the lifeboat, tankers, tugs, barges and snub-nosed fishing boats. There’s no need for the lighthouse tender now and we see far fewer rigs but other traffic is on the increase. In summer the liners visit so frequently we almost take them for granted – great white, picture-windowed, balconied, seagoing apartment blocks – dwarfing the tiny pilot-boat scurrying alongside.

Some still make an impact. Forty years ago I stood watching the QE2 being launched from John Brown’s shipyard. Now I can stand at my window and watch her heading seawards, her bulk blocking out the Sutor.

I may not mend nets or bait lines, but there are times when I share experiences with Fishertown wives down the centuries. I too have a seagoing husband. Like them I register the rising wind and the white-flecked waves. I too have stood gazing eastwards, waiting apprehensively until a far-off speck of red-brown sail comes reassuringly closer.

When you live by the sea some things never change.

Sea Changes – by Jennifer Mactaggart, 25 years in Cromarty.