ELIE NESS
The air had that thundery quality, a strange, pressurised stillness that stills the birds and thickens the light. Over the Firth of Forth, the sky was a bruise of pewter and violet, and the water beneath it had turned a flat, unreflective grey. It was an afternoon for staying indoors, for watching the coming weather from the safety of a window. But the ness called. Its dark finger of volcanic rock, pointing out into the uneasy sea, was a line of invitation, a dare against the brewing storm.
To walk the path to Elie Ness is to walk a line between worlds. On one side, the soft, marram-stitched dunes and the clipped greens of the golf course, a landscape of leisure. On the other, the seethe and fret of the North Sea, endlessly working at the ancient stone. The wind, when it came in gusts, carried the scent of salt, ozone, and the coming rain – a clean, electric smell. The rock underfoot was dark, pocked and igneous, a memory of the fire that formed this coast, now scoured smooth by millennia of water and ice.
And then, the tower. Lady’s Tower stands at the ness’s end, a folly in the truest sense. It is a ruin, but a deliberate one, built for solitude. I ran a hand over its salt-bitten sandstone. Here, Lady Janet Anstruther would come to bathe, a bell rung to warn the townsfolk away from the shoreline, preserving her privacy. Inside the roofless hexagonal cell, the wind keened with a different voice. To be within its walls is to be both sheltered and exposed, to see the vastness of the sea framed by crumbling stone, a lens for looking at the wild.
The first rumble of thunder was not a sound but a vibration, felt deep in the chest. It travelled up from the rock, a resonance from the storm’s heart miles away. Then came the flash, a silent, startling tear in the livid sky, and for a split-second the basalt gleamed wetly and the sea-foam shone a brilliant, spectral white. The world snapped back into its bruised colours, and the crack of the thunder followed, sharp and close. The rain began, not as a drizzle but as a sudden, heavy downpour, hissing on the hot rock and cold sea, blurring the horizon into a single, streaming watercolour of grey.
Turning back from the ness, with the full force of the squall at my back, was not a retreat but an immersion. The rain plastered my clothes to my skin, and the wind scoured my face. The path had vanished, the world reduced to the immediate, exhilarating rush of the elements. The tower, glimpsed over a shoulder, was a ghost-shape in the deluge, its story momentarily washed away, reclaimed by the much older, wilder story of the storm, the sea, and the stone.