Groff Haughs.

First day of our holiday and, while Mrs TD buried herself in quilts, I walked along the cliff path from Covesea to investigate the photogenic possibilities of the lighthouse, some caves and the rather enigmatic stack known as Groff Haughs. Having neglected to check the tides, it wasn’t possible to get down to either the stack or the caves and one would have to be careful to avoid being cut off; here one would merely have to wait for six hours for the tide to go out, at the caves it might be a little more dangerous.


There is some confusion over the name of the stack with a nearby two-legged version called Gows’ Castle, which was accidentally destroyed in 1941 by an over-enthusiastic band of Home Guardsmen on a mortar practice exercise in thick fog. In order to clear up some of the confusion, a gow is a seagull, where-as haughs are legs. The only reference I can find to Groff is as a corruption of the German name: Graff – meaning “pen”, but that is in a completely different context.
 
If that leaves you confused, you’re on your own; I became confuddled when I first stumbled across the stack while researching the caves six months ago.