24/08/2026
https://www.facebook.com/share/19LcCxJCzS/?mibextid=wwXIfr
🌾 On the Moray coast there is a desert. Beneath it lies a farming estate that fed hundreds of people, and it was buried alive in a matter of days.
The Barony of Culbin sat on the flat fertile ground between Nairn and Findhorn. It was good land, some of the best in the north, with a mansion house, orchards, gardens, farm towns and a whole community of tenants working it. The Kinnairds had held it since the 1300s.
The sand had been creeping for years before the end came. The dunes along that shore were held in place by marram grass, and the marram had been pulled for generations to thatch roofs and twist into rope, until the dunes had almost nothing binding them. Then, in the autumn of 1694, a great storm came in off the Moray Firth and drove the loosened sand inland in a wall.
It buried the fields. It buried the orchards. It buried the farm buildings and then the mansion house itself. People fled with what they could carry and did not come back, and in a very short time the entire barony was gone. Alexander Kinnaird petitioned Parliament in 1695 asking to be relieved of his taxes, because there was no longer any estate left to tax.
For two hundred years afterwards it was a wasteland of shifting dunes, and every so often the wind would scour down and expose a wall head, a chimney, a doorway, and then cover it over again. Local people spoke of it as a place under a curse.
From the 1920s the Forestry Commission planted it, and today Culbin is one of the largest forested dune systems in Britain, quiet and green and full of birds. Walk it now and you would never guess. 🌲
But under your feet there are d***s and hearths and the boundaries of fields, and the names of the people who worked them are in the parish records still. A whole community, and not one stone of it left standing above the sand.
