Witness account · 3 min read · Set in Scarth Bay ·
The Cable at Scarth Bay
A coastguard volunteer going out to check a fouled mooring at Scarth Bay finds the cable already run through the rocks and tied off to a bollard that was not there the week before.
- reliability: uncorroborated
- witness: Joseph Bramwell, coastguard volunteer
I went out to Scarth Bay on the Tuesday after the big spring tide to see to the fouled mooring off the north rocks. The harbour master had reported a buoy chain wound round a rock and a rope gone slack on its shackle, and as I am the only volunteer on the coast with a boat small enough to get in between the stacks, the job fell to me. I took the little Lucy, my own dinghy, and a set of rigging knives, and I was out on the water by half past seven.
The bay is a crescent of grey shingle with a low headland at each end and a cluster of black rock stacks in the middle, which the old charts mark as the Three Sisters. There is a single mooring buoy, painted orange, in the lee of the largest stack, and it is the only thing in the bay that has any business being there. I know the place as well as my own back step. I have fished it since I was a boy.
When I came round the stacks I saw the cable.
It ran from the base of the nearest rock, out across the shallow water toward the buoy, a single length of grey wire rope perhaps as thick as my wrist. It was taut. It was run through a pair of iron rings set into the rock face, one above the other, and at the far end it was tied off to a bollard. The bollard stood on the shingle at the water's edge, a squat black iron post with a rounded head, weathered and mossy at the base. It had not been there the week before. I was certain of that, because I had walked the shingle on the Friday to check the tide-line and had not seen it.
I brought the Lucy alongside the bollard and got out, and the shingle was firm under my boots. I put my hand on the iron. It was cold and rough and faintly damp, and the cable above it hummed very softly in the wind, the way a fence wire hums when a long way off a farmer is driving a van up the lane.
I followed the cable out toward the buoy with my eyes. It did not go to the buoy. It went past it, under the water, and I could see the line of it through the clear green shallows, sinking gently toward the deep channel at the mouth of the bay, where the charts show nothing but blue. It was running out, the way a line runs out to a boat that is not yet in view.
Then the tide turned. The shingle began to slide under my boots. I stepped back and felt the water come up over my ankles, cold and quick, and I looked down and saw the cable had gone slack. Not broken. Simply let go, sinking into the sand with a slow, deliberate motion, the way a sleeper lets go of a hand.
I cut the mooring free on the buoy, which took twenty minutes, because the chain was wrapped round the rock four times, and I hauled it up over the side and stowed it. I did not look at the bollard again. When I rowed out of the bay the rock stacks stood up very black in the afternoon sun, and on the top of the largest of them, where I had never once seen a bird perch, there was a row of small grey gulls standing very still, all facing toward the open sea.
I reported the mooring as cleared. I did not mention the bollard. The harbour master was pleased and asked no questions. But a week later the Scarth Bay fishermen found a new post at the water's edge, just above the high-tide line, with an iron ring bolted to the top. Nobody remembered putting it there. The ring has a single loop of wire through it, and the wire goes down into the bay, and it is still humming, very softly, when the wind is in the west.