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Secret of Survival at Catterline - By Cuthbert Graham

WHAT decides whether a community shall live or die? Just a few miles north of Catterline is the haven of Crawton, once a more populous place and a larger fishing centre, but now so derelict and deserted that it no longer finds a niche in the Registrar General's List of populated places. On that list at the last census Catterline was credited with 125 inhabitants and it may well have more today.

The fate of the olden fishertowns of Scotland, sacrificed to the demon of progress, the economic pressure of modern technology and centralisation, is one of the great tragedies of our country.

All up and down the east coast of Scotland are once vivid and thriving fishertowns that are now either dormitory suburbs of large towns or quaint holiday spots for weekend cottages, but which have no other reason for existence.

Catterline might well have been one of them - a mere place of recreation and escape. For this it has every desirable qualification and indeed it does attract at the weekends the water-skiers and skin-divers, the canoeists and the sailing dinghy sportsmen.

But it is more than a delightful playground for jaded citizens of the industrial age, it is still a place where serious work is done. It has achieved a remarkable balance in which the traditional fishing pursuits go on side by side with the high craftsmanship of painters and playwrights, all working together as a single intimate village community.

The greatest fear these residents of Catterline have is that their ideal working environment may become vulgarised by rash, out-of-character archi­tectural innovations, such as are all too frequent in other coastal beauty spots although this fear has been somewhat allayed by the protection already assured by wise planning provisions.

Nature and native adaptability have con­spired to save the character of Catterline. Sheer physical factors, the contours of the clifftop for example, have kept the more drastic intrusions of tourism at bay. There is just no suitable spot within the village where a caravan site could be laid out.

The fishing has been kept alive partly because of the proximity of Gourdon, that unique Scottish line-fishing port where the Catterline white fishers can land and sell their catches, and partly because of the profitable salmon netting station.

The Salmon harvest

Here day by day, the Sabbath excepted, through the seasons lasting from February 16^th to September 9^th- Skipper Lewis Adam and his crew sail out in their coble to make the round of their eleven nets, bringing and boxing the big gleamish fish for the firm of James Johnston and Sons.

One of the features of Catterline coast is the steepness of it's gradient, both above and below high water mark. Patrick Stewart noted this 175 years ago when he remarked on the Old Statistical Account "The sounding of all the coast at 100yds or less from the shore are from eight to 13 or 14 fathoms." This makes the disposition of salmon nets a tricky and skilled business, and the engined coble was one answer.

On the foreshore itelf the nets have to be disposed unusually steeply on the limited ground available - tricky for the fishers but a delight to Catterline's colony of artists, who have recorded the picturesque spectacle on scores of paintings.

Salmon line fishing is a life long profession. Sixty year old Skipper Adam, whose deeply tanned and characterful visage, is a favourite subject with the Catterline artists, began his salmon career in 1928 as a "cuddy boy" at Ethie Haven, carrying the catch from that station to waiting lorries at Lunan Bay, and came to work at Catterline in 1932.

"It's hard work" he says, "but not quite as hard as it used to be." Lighter equipment and coroline nets have taken  a little of the physical strain of the manpower. This season salmon catches at Catterline have not been exceptional, but the top haul a week or two ago was 100 salmon and grilse in one day.

At present Catterline has only one all-the-year-round white fishing crew, although there are three boats in the little harbour. Until the boom years of last century two boats was the normal complement of the creek.

3000 years ago

How far back does the story of Catterline go?  The  immensely picturesque clifftop ridge fronting a bay with fretted rocks on steep grassy slopes glorious with wild flowers must always have been attractive to human settlers. In February of this year a Bronze Age short stone cist, dating back to 1500 or 2000 B.C., was unearthed in the garden of William Adams at Brigstane Cottage.

It contained the skeleton of a little boy of five to seven years old, a boy with a gap toothed grin and the brachycephalous skull of the Beaker Folk, that remarkable strain of invaders from the Continent who were to settle in the North-east in such numbers as to become the predominant racial  type; right down to the present day.  His fragmented skull was "rebuilt" at Aberdeen University and from it a portrait was made which linked the Catterline of today with the Catterline 3000 years ago.

All that remains of the medieval Church of Catterline is its aumbry or sacrament house, built into the wall of the kirkyard and surmounted by a stone on which is a rudely incised cross and sword. Inside the kirkyard the oldest tombstone is that of Metellan Livingstone and Robert Douglas, the mother in-law and father-in-law of Sir George Ogilvy of Barras, the Governor of Dunnottar Castle and Guardian of the, Regalia.

Curiously enough there is another fascinating link with the Ogilvy family in the oldest part of the house of Braeside at Bridgend, Catterline, now the home of Mr Ian S. Munro, who is senior lecturer in primary education at Aberdeen College of Education. This very old portion with enormously thick walls and tiny windows, which became the wash house of a row of three cottages, dates from at least 1659 and was, it is believed, part of Margaret Ogilvy's dower house.

The three linked-up cottages which now form Braeside, had an interesting history in much more recent times. One of them was occupied by the late Joan Eardley when she was bringing fame to Catterline through her painting; another was occupied by her artist colleague Angus Neil. Ultimately all three in their united form became the home of James Morrison, another distinguished painter of the modern Glasgow School.

When Mr and Mrs Morrison moved to Montrose they were succeeded at Braeside by their friends Mr and Mrs Ian Munro and their son Robin. Here Mr Munro completed the biography of Lewis Grassic Gibbon on which he had been working for years and continued to write the radio plays for which he is well known. The latest of these "Bound to Go," a 60-minute drama with a Firth of Clyde setting, and a retired sailor as the principal character, will be broadcast by the BBC on December 11.

To see, as one does in Braeside, the works of the Catterline artists hanging side by side is a revelation. They glow with a sombre yet fiery beauty. This, of course, was the angle of vision that Joan Eardley so powerfully opened up; wintry suns, snow and stormy seas, the oblique lights of the short days. She is gone but she has a potent successor in Lil Neilson who confesses that what inspires her about Catterline above all is "its winter wildness."

Miss Neilson, a native of Fife, and a graduate of the Dundee School of Art, first came to Catterline in 1962 and worked side by side with Joan Eardley when she was at the height of her powers. She now has a cottage-studio in South Cottages, the southern wing of the village which rises up steeply on the high ridge of the cliff on that side of Catterline Bay.

She has painted the village in all lights but most notably at dusk or under sombre skies when the white line of the houses rides like a glowworm on a dark heaving wave of the grassy clifftop. James Morrison, on the other hand, was particularly interested in the patterns made by steeply draped salmon nets, the contours of the fishing craft, the long linear magic of the furrows on the good land which Lewis Grassic Gibbon immortalised in "Sunset Song."

Mrs Annette Stephen, in her colourful retreat at the Old Watch House, produced strong and vivid watercolours often with a maritime theme. She has done some works as a result of a recent visit to Shetland where, just as in Catterline itself, man lives very close to the sea - as at Lodberries of Lerwick, where the old houses dip their feet in the water.

But the secret of Catterline as a milieu for the artist seems to consist in this that nature in all her moods is ever present and familiar. The sense of alienation imposed on man by an artificial urban environment is a thousand miles away.

Saga of a village

It was a January that the Court of Teinds united the parishes of Catterline and Kinneff.

But it should be remembered that no village of Catterline existed at that time, nor for fully 100 years after. In 1793 the Rev. Patrick Stewart recorded the fact the "there is neither town nor village, not six families dwelling together - the seatowns of Gaphill and Catterline excepted - in all the parish."

This may seem a rather Irish way of putting it, but a seatown for two boats, as Catterline was then, did not imply anything so extensive as a village. The village in fact was Patrick's own idea.

Mr Stewart's dream did come true. Viscount Arburthnott built the pier and then the village followed. As the nineteenth century progressed it filled up rapidly, though the tradesmen and manufacturers were never numerous. By the end of the century every cottage contained a fisherman and his family. There were about 20 small white fishing craft.

Mr Robert Taylor can remember when every house in the place was full to over-lowing,  and the difficulty was that the young people unable to find a home for themeselves had to go elsewhere.

After the first World War decline set in as it did in every fishing haven in the country.

But today a new point of equilibrium has been reached. The only question is will there be a young generation to take over  when the present one retires?

I found one answer to this in the visitors' book at the historic old Kirk of Kinneff, where the large round hand of a whole set of youthful signatories was followed by Catterline village addresses. Surely some of these will carry on the torch.