As a wee girl in the 70s I spent most of my summer holidays in Dornoch, where my grandparents lived. My siblings and I loved the town (actually a cathedral city), with its wide high street, home to the weekly pipe band practise on a Saturday night and lined with touristy shops; the fields surrounding my grandfather’s house, where we took a neighbours’ dog for walks and watched it hopelessly chase rabbits; and the sunny walled garden and orchard where my grandfather patiently grafted fruit trees, a hobby he had picked up living and working as a doctor in Peru. More than anything we loved the endless white sandy beaches that stretched up and down the coast for miles in either direction.
Every year we would race to the beach at the earliest opportunity, stopping only to select an array of brashly coloured buckets and spades from the local shops (transformed into Aladdin’s caves of tourist tat over the summer months). Once we had arrived, passing the golf course clubhouse and the caravan site on the right and miles of scratchy machair-covered dunes to the left, we would inspect the panorama; comparing what lay before us with memories from previous visits. Here was the best place to pitch camp for the day, with the obligatory stripy wind-breaker, rugs and picnic bag; there was the huge rock from which you could dive into the sea when the tide was fully in (or lose a shoe to an unexpectedly big wave, the other shoe later being donated to the neighbours grateful dog); and there, further on, the best rock-pooling spot.
After an hour or so of splashing and exploring, one of us three would plonk down on the sand and begin the annual serious business of cowrie hunting.
‘Cowrie’ is the name given to a particular type of seashell found washed up on beaches. Tiny, pinky-white and delicate-looking (but actually rock hard), the shells are a softened oval, ribbed with curved lines. They look almost like a child’s pinkie fingertip. Around the Dornoch area cowries are – or certainly were in the 70s – relatively rare. Over the course of three weeks’ worth of studious beach-combing we might only find two or three between us.
We would each select a patch of sand and inch our way forward on hands and knees, eyes darting around to pick out the tell-tale perfectly formed little shells, perhaps moving a stone to inspect what lay underneath or brushing a few grains of multi-coloured sand from a tiny mound, only to be disappointed to find a still pretty, but less coveted, smooth and milky-pale pebble, or a little fragment of mother-of-pearl, and always careful to avoid kneeling on any spikey sundried seaweed. Our eyes would only leave the miniature sandy landscape, inches away from out faces, to sneak a look at each other’s progress. If one of us was successful we would whoop triumphantly and wave our minute trophy in the air while the other two would have to decide whether to abandon current searches and move to seemingly more fruitful pastures, or keep going doggedly on.
The end of the school holiday would arrive too soon, we would say goodbye to my grandparents, their cats and their house and leave Dornoch and its ‘Carlsberg don’t do beaches but if they did…’ behind for another year.
For any of us children with a new cowrie in our pocket, the sadness of leaving would be tempered with the knowledge of what was to come. Once we’d settled back home, at some point one of us would suggest a game of ‘shop’. Due to their rarity, cowries were much prized, and for the price of a cowrie I could buy a week’s loan of my sister’s favourite ragdoll, several copies of my brother’s Beano… or pretty much whatever my heart desired.
In 1979 my grandfather died, my grandmother moved to Inverness to be closer to her sisters and holidays in Dornoch stopped. I wouldn’t visit again for over 20 years, and when I did many of my childhood haunts were gone, or so changed as to be unrecognisable. The fields beside my grandfather’s house had been torn up and built on, the towering rocks we used to leap into the sea from were a shadow of their former monolithic selves, half-buried in the ever-changing sandscape.
The first summer after my grandfather died we spent our holidays on Iona. One morning we decided to walk to the nearby beach. I have a clear recollection of a long straight walk along a road with large flat fields on either side and the constant sound of crickets chirruping. We got to the beach and found a likely looking spot. One of us must have sat on the sand, picked up a handful of sand to sieve through inquisitive fingers … and found a cowrie. A miracle! Soon we had two excitedly clutched handfuls of cowries each. That beach was forever more in my mind called ‘Cowrie Beach’.
Our holiday came to an end and we went home. Each of us was desperate to play shop, to spend the vast riches of cowries that we had accumulated. Perhaps my older sister had a glimmering of understanding but my wee brother and I were at a loss to understand why our cowries, once considered so ‘valuable’, were now practically worthless.
I sat with a cowrie cupped in my hand, dwarfed even in my small palm, my gaze drawn along each line and back and tried to understand what had happened. I still loved my cowries, I could still see that each one was a perfectly beautiful miniature object, but somehow, something had changed.
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Last year, on a beach in Cornwall, I found a cowrie completely by chance (on Orkney and Shetland they are called ‘groatie buckies’, I don’t know what they are called in Cornwall). I looked around for more, enlisting the help of my three children, but there was none to be found.
BlueprintWriting 