Scottish anchorages

A touch crowded - for Scotland

David Balfour's Bay (confusingly another Traigh Gheal) is a delightful bay with a fabulous beach on the south side of Erraid, an almost uninhabited tidal island apart from an off shoot of the Findhorn Foundation since 1978, a small spiritual community living in the old lighthouse keeper cottages, where you can go for a personal retreat.

In fact there are two beaches connected at low tide, both are good for boldering. The water is pristine, the sand brilliant for sand castles. No wonder it can get a bit crowded with maybe six or so boats at anchor when the wind is in the north.

It is known as David Balfour's bay because it is where Robert Louis Stevenson imagined Davie – in Kidnapped - being thrown ashore clutching a spar from the Covenant, his sinking ship wrecked on the Torran rocks ("are there many of them?" the captain had asked, revealing his poor sense of navigation).

RLS was the black sheep of his family who were mostly engineers who built most of the Scottish lighthouses – indeed his father used to take him on trips by boat around the coast so he knew very well the places he later wrote about, at least in his memory because most of his stories were written after he had left Scotland. In 1890, near the end of his life and in Samoa thousands of miles from Scotland, he wrote: “Whenever I smell seawater, I know that I am not far from one of the works of my ancestors. The Bell Rock stands monument for my grandfather, the Skerry Vhor for my Uncle Alan; and when the lights come out at sundown along the shores of Scotland, I am proud to think they burn more brightly for the genius of my father”. If you want to know more about Scottish lighthouses you can do no better than read Bella Bathurst's marvellous book - the Lighthouse Stevensons (Harper Collins 1999).