An unco place....

Today I thought to blip Seton Collegiate Church - never been there and often meant. But although the sun was out, the sky was blue, the air was not cold - Historic Scotland would not agree that summer had arrived. It seems that it will come April. And then the Church will open.

So, instead, the sweep of beach at North Berwick with the Bass beyond.

Which brings us back to RL Stevenson - who holidayed regularly at North Berwick, and whose cousin, David, built the lighthouse on The Bass. When Jamie Balfour came to the end of his trail in "Kidnapped" he went on to further adventures. Kidnapped twice indeed in his young life, this time he is put on to the Bass Rock so that he can't interfere in the trial and condemnation of James of the Glens. This book is called "Catriona". And here he describes The Bass. (The Scots word "unco" means unfamiliar, strange, or odd!)

"It was an unco place by night, unco by day; and there were unco sounds; of the calling of the solans , and the plash of the sea, and the rock echoes that hung continually in our ears. It was chiefly so in moderate weather. When the waves were anyway great they roared about the rock like thunder and the drums of armies, dreadful, but merry to hear, and it was in the calm days when a man could daunt himself with listening; so many still, hollow noises haunted and reverberated in the porches of the rock."