Frozen hunt for fossils endeared me to Brora

"And you can find belemnites up the river."

Really? Goodness me! Belemnites are extinct ancestors of squid. Councillor Stone makes a mental note to go fossil hunting.

This was a conversation I had with a young member of another political party shortly before the Lochinver all-candidates hustings last Friday. And it goes to prove that political differences need not necessarily be about opposing sides shaking fists and snarling at each other.

Ours was a most civilised conversation – approximately 160 million years removed from the General Election.

"Oh yes, long before you were born, I remember collecting fossils down on the Brora rocks. Jurassic they were, and oddly enough down my way we have a small Jurassic outcrop of limestone along from the village of Shandwick…"

In a trice I was a student again, and staying at the Braes Hotel in the late 1970s.

Sitting in Lochinver, I was suddenly back on the other side of the county eating mince and tatties for my tea and soaking up the warm atmosphere of a very happy three day stay in Brora.

Because I had poured a pan of boiling water over my bare foot (maybe more of that another day; it is a story in itself) and because I was reduced to limping along with the help of a stick, any notion of my joining the rest of my geology class on their February field trip to Arran was out of the question.

But the trouble was that in order to complete the term’s work I had to have done some kind of outside investigation and study, and this was why I was relieved when my tutor agreed to me doing a solo field trip to study the Brora fossils. Thus, with my geology hammer and rucksack, one wet and windy day in March I caught the train at Tain and headed north.

Now, if you are to make sense of this tale, then two things need to be explained.

The first is that apart from kind Mrs Mackay having taught me and the rest of the Ardgay cubs to swim in the village’s wee heated swimming pool, I had no knowledge of Brora other than that those strange lumps that made your fire smoke, Brora briquettes, came from there.

Apart from that, to a young me, and long before the Dornoch Bridge was built, Brora was effectively as far away and as alien as, oh I don’t know, Peterhead or Fort William. This also explains my second point.

Believe it or not, when I left school and first went to university, I was pretty shy. New places and new people weren’t the easiest of challenges, and it was for this reason that I was apprehensive as I headed north.

What would Brora be like?

As the train rattled along, I scowled at my geological map, bit my nails, and inwardly worried. This wasn’t going to be fun.

But there’s the thing that sticks with me today – the exact opposite turned out to be true.

From the first minute I stepped into the Braes Hotel, I was made welcome in the warmest possible way.

Was I one of the Stones from Tain that made crowdie? Would I like a pot of tea before I went out and started chipping the rocks? Oh dear, a filthy day for it! Had I enough woollies? Supper at six – and I could watch the telly while I ate my fish and chips.

My God, it was cold.

As occupations go, hacking away at the rocks below Brora while the rain lashed one side of you and the salt spray the other, fumbling with your frozen fingers, like so many raw chipolatas, to pick up the exposed fossils, well a holiday in the Bahamas has the edge.

But when I got back to the Braes it was so so different.

I just loved staying there; and when the time came to go back to Tain, do you know, I really didn’t want to go.

Ever since then, because a shy lad once found kindness and welcome, and encouragement too, I have been fond of the village. It is as simple – some might even say as silly – as that.

"Hey, thanks a lot for the tip about the belemnites!"

Hustings over, and political parties packing up their respective speeches and slogans and preparing to move on, some might have found my parting words strange. But that’s me.

Next week I shall write of my truly astonishing discovery of trilobites at the afore-mentioned Jurassic outcrop near Shandwick.

Now I wonder where my geology hammer has got to…

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