North Berwick

The jawbone above town

On top of North Berwick Law there is a whale's jawbone, and it is made of fibreglass. It was airlifted to the summit on 26 June 2008, the latest in a line of jawbone arches that have stood up there since 1709. The Law is a 187-metre volcanic plug rising directly behind the town, and a footpath from the base car park reaches the top in about an hour. In clear weather the view runs across the Firth of Forth to the Bass Rock, past an Iron Age hill-fort and Napoleonic and wartime military structures.

Down at sea level the town arranges itself around a small working harbour, with a wide sandy beach on either side — West Bay and Milsey Bay. Offshore sit the islands of the Forth: Craigleith, the Lamb, Fidra, and the Bass Rock, which looks white from a distance because of the gannets and their guano. It holds one of the largest Northern gannet colonies in the world.

Harbour, beaches and island life

On the Old Pier by the harbour, the Lobster Shack sells lobster rolls, crab dishes, fish tacos and chowder, sourced directly from the boats that land alongside. There are no reservations; you arrive and find a seat under the heated cover. Dogs get water bowls, and there is beer, wine and prosecco to go with lunch. Nearby, the Scottish Seabird Centre opened in 2000, with live cameras trained on the Bass Rock, Craigleith and Fidra feeding into its exhibits, boats out to the islands, and a café that looks straight over the Forth.

North Berwick takes its golf seriously. North Berwick Golf Club dates from 1832 and plays the West Links, whose 15th hole, the Redan, has been copied on courses around the world. The Glen Golf Club plays the East Links, and the town keeps a Golfing Heritage Trail. The Ship Inn sits on Quality Street near the harbour, and the High Street carries the delis, bakeries and independent shops of a town that has stayed prosperous.

Golf beside the Forth

By the harbour, on the Auld Kirk Green, stand the ruins of St Andrew's Old Kirk. In 1590 the kirkyard was named as the meeting place at the centre of the North Berwick witch trials, where the accused were said to have gathered to conspire against James VI after storms battered his voyage home from Denmark. More than seventy people were accused. Agnes Sampson, an elderly woman from Humbie, was tortured, strangled and burned; the schoolmaster John Fian of Prestonpans was burned at the stake in December 1591. In 2022 Scotland's First Minister issued a formal apology.

The Auld Kirk and the witch trials

Three miles east along the shore, Tantallon Castle stands on a sea cliff facing the Bass Rock, a red-sandstone curtain wall the Douglases held through sieges by James IV, James V and Cromwell's General Monck. West lie Dirleton, with its green and thirteenth-century castle, and Gullane, with Muirfield. Trains have run to Edinburgh since 1850 and still terminate here; the city is thirty-odd minutes away by rail, or by the A198 and the A1.

Castles, connections and Stevenson

Robert Louis Stevenson spent his boyhood holidays here. Fidra, low and dark off the western beach, is the island usually credited with the map in Treasure Island.