I’ve been trying to pull together some family history stuff to try and see what use farming folk in in the late nineteenth century made of the railways in rural north east Scotland.

(digitised 1920 Ordnance Survey map of St Cyrus – National Library of Scotland)

In the mid 1860s my great to the whatevers acquired the lease of a farm at Scotston which was adjacent to the newly built branch line from Montrose to Inverbervie, and I’m guessing that they would have used trains from St Cyrus station to Montrose rather than the North Water Bridge station simply because, while further it is a more level road, a consideration when produce had to be hauled by cart, or people had to walk to the train – remember that the safety bicycle was not in common use to the 1890’s and even then they may have preferred a more level route.

The railway line closed in the 1960’s and I can just remember  the last steam freight trains puffing their way laboriously along the line.

The line was engineered to avoid steep gradients as much as possible but there was no avoiding crossing the North Water (sometimes called the North Esk) which ran through a steep valley before flowing into the sea.

In the late 1700’s a stone road bridge was built crossing the river at right angles but that involved a relatively steep descent  and ascent up the other side – for years there was an original Royal Scottish Automobile Club sign on the Montrose side of the bridge warning of the steep descent and sharp curve at the bottom of the hill.

Steam trains of course don’t do sharp descents and curves, so the builders of the Bervie railway built a rather impressive stone viaduct over the North Esk – it’s still there and now forms part of a cycling route.

Sometime before the 1979 Scottish referendum, someone graffitied the bridge with the slogan ‘Scotland Free or a Desert’ – a slogan originating from the 1820 Radical War and later reused during the Red Clydeside period in Glasgow at the end of world war one. The quote ultimately derives from Tacitus – they hae makit ae desert and hae callit it peace.

(image of graffiti cropped from https://canmore.org.uk/collection/1959169)

The graffiti was there for years, and while researching the use of the railway I idly wondered if it was still there.

It was certainly there in the 2000s and I remember pointing it out to J when we went down to St Cyrus beach – a wild dramatic beach a little like some of the more remote beaches in Victoria – to do a little bird watching (utterly unsuccessful) and take a look at the eighteenth century graveyard.

Strangely, for such a well known local landmark, it proved almost impossible to track down recent images of the graffiti – even Canmore, which includes images showing the graffiti into the early part of this century does not mention it, and web searches do not bring up links to images on Facebook and Instagram – I can only guess that the graffiti disappeared sometime before the rise of Facebook and Instagram, perhaps removed during restoration works…