While researching this trip I wrote several museums and libraries along the route, inquiring whether there were any old people who lived in the area during the war who might be willing to talk with me.

I hoped I’d find someone who remembered watching the training exercises for the Normandy invasion that occurred along the coast in the winter of 1943-44. In hindsight that was unlikely, as the people near the rehearsal sites were evacuated, and the activities, in any case, were considered secret.

My inquiry paid off in another way, however.  It led me to 84-year-old Donnie Stewart.

The librarian for the Lossiemouth branch of the Elgin Library, Jane Thomas, with considerable generosity and effort, arranged for me to interview Mr. Stewart.  She also agreed to open the library 45 minutes early so we could talk before the public arrived.  As an added bonus, she arranged for me to get a tour of the 19th-century Covesea lighthouse outside Lossiemouth.

I walked out of the Skerry Brae Hotel, where I’d spent the night in a £30 room, with just enough time to get to the library by 9.15 a.m. I was, of course, carrying a backpack. The first car that came by pulled to the side.  A man rolled down the window and called me by name. It was Mr. Stewart and his seven-year-old springer spaniel, Pepper.

So we got to the library at the same time–and a few minutes early.

Mr. Stewart was born in 1931 in Lossiemouth, descended from four generations of fishermen. He was the youngest of five children. His father was colorblind, which prevented him from being a boat skipper. However, he owned a quarter of the boat he fished on.  One of his father’s brothers had  gone to California, working first in Needles on the railroad, and later in Los Angeles in the oil industry.

Mr. Stewart’s father started out fishing on sailboats. Those craft  were replaced by steam drifters that required crews of 9 or 10 men. They, in turn, were replaced by diesel-powered boats, which were more practical and needed only a crew of five.

They fished for herring with drift nets. “Herring fed at midnight. You put your net out at tea time, and came back at breakfast time and it was full,” Mr. Stewart said.

Most of the herring fishery collapsed with the loss of the German and Russian markets in World War I.  The catch switched to haddock and cod, caught with seine nets. A good day was 100 boxes, with each box weighing seven stone, or 14 pounds. The men gutted the fish on the boat, leaving the heads on.

Herring had been sold through futures contracts, but haddock and cod were auctioned every day (except Sunday) at 3 p.m. on the dock. The fish was then shipped south by train and truck.  The price was higher on Thursdays, when most of it went to Glasgow, whose large Catholic community couldn’t eat meat on Friday.

Mr. Stewart’s family had fish every night except Sunday, when they had sausages. I asked if he got sick of it.

“What would you want to do, starve? With five children, if you didn’t eat it it would soon vanish off your plate.”

Mr. Stewart’s brother, Peter, volunteered for the RAF in 1938 “as soon as he recognized that Hitler meant business.” He was a flight sergeant, a radio operator and a gunner on a Wellington bomber. He died in 1942, bombing Cologne, and is buried in Germany.  Another brother, Jim, was on a minesweeper, accompanying convoys to Malta.  A sister was in the British equivalent of the WACs as a clerical worker.

For Donnie and his friends, however, the war meant excitement and freedom. “We viewed it as entertainment,” he says today, with candor and chagrin.

“Boys had a great life. We went out after breakfast and were out all day. School was an interruption. We knew all the men at the harbor and how much they were making. We went to weddings and funerals. We didn’t want to see our parents. Grown ups said ‘No’.  Plus, the house was cold.  There was only one coal-burning fire.”

In the late fall of 1940, when there was a massive effort to line Scotland’s northeast coast with concrete tank barriers, he and his friends helped collect flat stones for their foundations. They weren’t paid; it was to be part of the action.

Some of the excitement was tragic.

In July 1941 a Junker 88, aiming to bomb the nearby aerodrome (whose construction in 1938 had brought full employment to Lossiemouth), dropped four bombs on the town.

One blew off the back of a house, one fell in the street and one fell unexploded in a quarry. But one landed on a house and killed four people–two locals and two people who’d moved up from Portsmouth, England, to be safe.

Plane crashes were common. “Three hundred and eighty-four people died learning to fly out at the Lossie aerodrome,” Mr. Stewart said. One crash was especially memorable.

“We sat and watched this plane take off from the aerodrome near the golf course. We watched it swing around, and then the starboard wing fell off and landed on the 17th fairway. The rest of the plane went on for 400 meters and crashed on that rock,” he said, pointing as we drove along the shore on the way to the library.

It was high tide and there were no flames. A man tried to swim out to them and was drowned.  The entire crew of five died. Three of them were Australian.

“I met the nephew of one of them a few years ago,” he said. “He had come to see where Uncle Ed had died.”

He told a story about one of his classmates at Elgin Academy, where he later went to school. The boy, Danny, and a friend “played down at the rocks as we did. They found a strange object and tried to open it up. After a few tries, the other boy decided to use the traditional method, and battered it with a stone. It exploded, because it was a booby trap, dropped by the Luftwaffe along the East Coast in large numbers. The other boy died and Danny became partially but increasingly deaf.”

Twelve days after VE-Day, on May 8, 1945, a Wellington bomber testing its engines crashed in the town, killing a woman, her five sons, and two other people.

Donnie Stewart never went to war. He did spend two years in National Service after the war, earning four shillings a day. (“Egg and chips at the time cost 2 shillings 6 pence, a half-day’s pay.”)

He went to the University of Aberdeen and eventually earned a master’s degree in metallurgy. He worked at British Petroleum, and he also taught at Strathclyde University. He got early retirement, thanks to Mrs. Thatcher, and moved back to Lossiemouth when he was 60.

His wife died several years ago. He has one child and one grandchild.  And Pepper.

This post isn’t about Scotland.  It’s about events I learned of while researching the rehearsals for D-Day carried out on the Moray Firth, whose southern shore I walked on The Great Outdoors Challenge.

The events described aren’t well known to Americans, and were briefly suppressed by the United States Department of War after they happened.   The memorial to the American men who died in Lyme Bay off Slapton Sands on the south coast of England was organized by an Englishman who was a child living nearby when they happened.

The memorial now includes an amphibious tank that foundered during the exercise, and was recovered decades later.

“Exercise Tiger” was one of the last and more elaborate rehearsals for the Normandy invasion.  It involved 30,000 men and was a multi-day event that started on April 27.  Among the participants was Force U, headed by American Rear Admiral Don P. Moon, of the U.S. Navy.  Part of the Western Task Force, his vessels were a mix of American landing craft and British warships.  They were added to the D-Day plans late in the day, and were undertrained for the occasion.

Moon was born in Kokomo, Indiana, in 1894. He graduated from the Naval Academy in 1916. He caught the end of World War I at the dawn of his career.

The commander of the Western Task Force was Rear Admiral Alan G. Kirk.  His authority did not extend to activities off Cherbourg, France, across the English Channel from where his ships would be operating. The Germans had a naval presence there.  Instead, authority to respond to that threat rested with the British naval authorities for the harbor at Portsmouth.  Kirk had requested a change of command structure, as his vessels were the ones at risk, and was turned down by British Admiral Bertram Ramsay.

On the day of the exercise, several vessels were late leaving Portsmouth Harbor.  Moon postponed the amphibious landings an hour, but gave the order to do so just five minutes before the landings were to begin.

The British cruiser shelling the beach, HMS Hawkins, received the message, but many of the landing vessels did not. As a consequence, troops were being discharged at the same time shells were landing. This resulted in friendly-fire casualties; the exact number is disputed. Ramsay said in his diary that the exercise was “a flop,” with “much to criticise.”

Then worse things happened.

Soon after midnight, eight LSTs (landing ship, tank) with thousands of soldiers were offshore, awaiting to play their part in the mock invasion. Two British ships, the Scimitar and the Azalea, were supposed to be protecting them.  However, the Scimitar collided with an American landing craft in Plymouth Harbor just before departure and suffered a two-foot hole in its bow.  The commander-in-chief of Plymouth Harbor ordered the ship into the yards for repair.

Neither he nor the captain of the damaged vessel notified Commander Bernard Skahill, the commodore of the convoy of fully loaded LSTs offshore. Skahill saw the Scimitar going in the wrong direction “but he assumed it was part of the complicated maneuvering necessary to get all the ships out of port and into formation,” according to “Neptune: The Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings” (2014) by Craig L. Symonds.

About 10 p.m. that evening, nine German E-boats left Cherbourg. The so-called Schnellboote–fast boats–had 7,500-horsepower Daimler-Benz engines and were faster and longer than PT boats. Each had a 40 mm gun, carried four torpedoes, and were camouflaged to operate at night. Their departure was noted by British radar technicians, but neither Skahill nor the captain of the Azalea were notified until after midnight. But the Plymouth Harbor commander realized the convoy was under protected, and dispatched a destroyer, Saladin, as a relief escort at 1.37 a.m.

Shortly after 1 a.m. the German boats attacked the waiting LSTs.  Many people on board the landing crafts thought it was part of the rehearsal when they saw green tracer rounds.  At 2.07 a.m. a torpedo hit LST 507, knocking out the electricity and starting fires in the gasoline-powered tanks, with small arms ammunition “cooking off.”  The ship had nearly 500 soldiers, and more than 100 crew. The metal pins holding the life rafts to the bulkeads had rusted in place. Men began jumping overboard.

Another LST (531) was hit 11 minutes later, and less than a minute later, a second time. It sank in minutes.

The life vests given the soldiers were like bicycle tubes wrapped around their chests, although most men wore them at their waist so they wouldn’t interfere with their packs. When they triggered the CO2 cartridges, the vests inflated, tipping many wearers over and putting their heads under water. The water was extremely cold, and people who held onto the two-man rafts (20 people on one) eventually lost consciousness from hypothermia.

The first two LSTs sank. A third LST was hit in the crew quarters and galley after the skipper made an avoidance maneuver after seeing the torpedo, which otherwise would have hit it amidships.

Skahill, the commander of the convoy, ordered the remaining vessels to head to shore. But the skipper of the vessel Skahill was riding on objected.  “In an act of near mutiny, he got on the 1-MC loudspeaker and explained the situation to the men on board. Their shipmates and fellow soldiers were dying out there, he announced.  Who wanted to go back to get them? A rousing cheer went up, and Skahill capitulated. The [vessel] returned to the scene,” Symonds wrote.

There is no better example of the Navy principle that a ship’s captain is the person responsible for what his vessel does, even when the commander of the fleet of which it is a member is aboard the vessel, too.

At that point, however, only a few people were still alive.  A few were rescued. The destroyer dispatched from Plymouth, Saladin, and the LST began retrieving bodies, but stopped when orders from shore told them to return to shore.

Over the next few days the bodies were collected. Among the dead were slightly more than a dozen people who knew the exact details of Operation Overlord, including when and where it was to occur. There was much anxiety until all those bodies were recovered. D-Day planners worried that someone with the knowledge might have been captured alive by the Germans and could reveal the plans under interrogation or torture.

The official Navy death toll was 639 people–198 sailors and 441 soldiers. The memorial at Slapton Sands lists the death count as 739. There are other estimates, some higher and including large numbers of friendly fire casualties on shore.

What is certain is that the number of American servicemen who died at Slapton Sands was more than the number who died on Utah Beach–one of two landing spots for American forces–five weeks later.

The debacle was kept secret–probably on Eisenhower’s orders–so it wouldn’t undermine morale and support for the invasion. Survivors were kept in hospitals, isolated from other members of the invasion force. Families of the dead were not notified until after D-Day, and their loved ones were officially listed as among the dead from D-Day.

The tragedy led to a coordination of radio communication between the British and American forces, and an improvement in the life jackets.

“Another failure,” according to one author, “was that almost everyone involved with Exercise Tiger had conceived of it as another rehearsal and had behaved accordingly. There had been so many practice landings that the sailors and soldiers–even the officers–had trouble making the mental adjustment to actual combat . . . [M]any clung to the idea that this was a rehearsal right up to the moment they found themselves in the water.”

Admiral Moon had no role in the events that occurred that night. Nevertheless, in Navy tradition, he was deemed responsible because he was commanding officer of the flotilla that had been attacked.

The day after the debacle he was brought before the chief of the Western Task Force, of which his vessels were a part.  Rear Admiral Arthur Struble looked out a window and saw a British submarine sail by with a broom tied to its periscope signifying a “clean sweep.” He said: “Well, I see somebody did his duty.”

One of Moon’s staff officers, Captain John Moreno, recalled: “that Struble thereupon turned on Moon with ‘the coldest glance I’ve ever seen . . . [and] brutally snarled, “All right, Moon, tell me what happened” ,’ ” according to historian Joseph Balkoski.

Moon’s forces performed acceptably on D-Day.  By early August, however, Moon was called to command the invasion force for an attack on southern France called Operation Dragoon. He told his superiors that he and his men were unprepared, and requested a delay.  He was turned down.

Moon had worked 15-hour days, seven days a week, for months. He suffered from such obvious exhaustion that he had been referred to both the medical officer on his ship and the Eighth Fleet medical officer. The losses at Slapton Sands weighed heavily on him.

On the morning of August 5, 1944, in his cabin, he wrote a message that said in part: “With the mind stalled & crazy . . . things once easy are not in sight. Command is wrong under such a condition . . . Overwork thru the years–I have given the Navy everything I had–too much–it has broken me. My country, what am I doing to you. My wife & dear children . . . I am sick, so sick.”

He wrapped his .45 automatic in a towel, put it to his temple and pulled the trigger.

I got the idea to walk this route when I learned that parts of the Moray Coast had been used to practice amphibious landings in World War II in advance of the Normandy invasion.

It turns out very little has been written on this subject.  Winston Churchill devoted two sentences to it in his six-volume history of World War II.

“One British division with its naval counterpart did all its earlier training in the Moray Firth area of Scotland. The winter storms prepared them for the rough-and-tumble of D-Day.”

Information from various sources, however, reveals that exercises occurred from December 1943 to March 1944.  They involved principally the 3rd Infantry Division of the British Army, as well as Navy and RAF  forces.

These “combined operations” we’re unusual and unpredictable, given the different command structures and cultures of the military services.  People paid with their lives getting the kinks worked out (as a later post will describe).

Some sources say the two shores of the Moray Firth were chosen because they resemble the beaches of Normandy where the invasion of France was to take place.  How true that is I don’t know.  I’ve never been to Normandy.  I know, however, that the beaches I walked on where the rehearsals occurred do not have high bluffs over them, as I’ve seen in some photographs of the Normandy beaches.

What this area clearly offered, then and now, are long beaches (several over five miles); tides that leave huge expanses of sand when the water is out;  cold, rough water; and relatively few people.

On November 11, 1943, the village of Inver on the Tarbat Peninsula that forms the north shore of the Moray Firth was told it had one month to finish the harvests and move all inhabitants and animals. The affected area was 15 square miles and had about 900 residents. There were 56 children in the Inver primary school, which closed November 26.

A “displenishing sale” was held at the nearby town of Dingwall, where 1,050 cattle, 8,000 sheep, 60 horses, and 50 pigs were sold. (Chickens weren’t sold; they were taken or eaten before the evacuation). The prices were low because of the season and a prohibition against widespread advertising of the sale for reasons of war security.

Tarbat was a the site for live-fire with tank weapons, as well as a limited amount of shelling from ships.

About the same time, a sparsely populated area just west of the mouth of the River Findhorn, including a hamlet named Kintessack, was given by three weeks to evacuate.  Eighteen Italian prisoners of war were brought in to help with the threshing of grain and the digging of potatoes and sugar beets.

Personal accounts of the exercises are rare.

A 2007 doctoral dissertation by historian Tracy Craggs (University of Sheffield) quotes a veteran named Peter Brown, who recalled a mock assault in November 1943.  He was immersed after jumping out of the landing craft.

” ‘Our objective in this exercise was a wood about fifteen miles inland across rough countryside. By the time we got there and had dug a slit trench I was in a pretty poor state. My clothes had partially dried but as darkness fell and it got colder I could not stop shivering and began to think I would not last the night. However about three in the morning the exercise was called off and we were able to light a huge bonfire and this, together with a generous rum ration, probably saved my life’. ”

(I personally doubt the beach assault was followed by a 15-mile walk inland.  Fifteen-hundred yards is more likely.  But who knows?)

The historian writes that “in January, three days were spent at Burghead Bay during Exercise `Grab’, with the intention `to practice assaults on beaches and the capture of initial objectives by assault battalions’. There was also emphasis on night operations, including breaching minefields, compass work and direction finding, as well as time spent on the range.”

It was a difficult time of year to undertake such maneuvers, with winter seas and only six hours of daylight.  It’s intimidating enough now, when the weather is pretty good and there’s useful light for about 19 hours a day.

Exercises at Burghead on December 22 and January 9 had landing craft leave from Fort George, cross the firth, and return to the southern shore  to simulate a crossing of the English Channel.  There was apparently much seasickness.

The biggest exercise was on March 30-31, also at Burghead, where 204 Sherman tanks, 32 Stuart tanks, and all the infantry of the 3d Division, plus cruisers and destroyers, took part, according to the pamphlet “Evacuation:  Tarbat Peninsula 1943-4” (undated) by Dr. James A. Fallon.

There were surprisingly few casualties.  One occurred in February and involved so-called “duplex-drive” tanks, which were outfitted with watertight collars that allowed them to float and move with a propeller connected to the engine. Two tanks swamped and one person drowned.  In all, five tanks were lost in the rehearsals, according to records.

In April, the troops moved to the south coast of England, where larger, more complicated, and in one case disastrous, rehearsals were held involving American and Canadian forces as well as British.

In May, the local people were allowed to return to Inver.  The government paid for damages to houses and farm buildings.  In many places, however, the ground had been compacted from tanks and took years to recover.  Purebred herds that had taken decades to build were gone.  Farmers removed unexploded shells from the ground for a long time, according to a pamphlet “The Evacuation of Inver” put together by the village’s schoolchildren a number of years ago.

It was all chocked up to “doing your bit” for the war effort.

There were other, subtle disruptions, too.  The Inver school reopened at the end of August, and the logbook for September 1, 1944 notes:  “Attendance is disappointing. Some of the boys absent themselves from School for no apparent reason.”

A newspaper account sent to me by Tim Negus, one of the volunteers at the Findhorn Heritage Center, whom I met when I passed by, included this observation from a woman who was a schoolteacher when the area near the Findhorn was evacuated.

“All stoppers from the sinks were removed.  I understand that the troops carried their own personal stoppers wherever they went.  But I hasten to add the soldiers took the stoppers only.”

A number of years ago, Tim tried hard to find someone who remembered the assaults.  They would have been visible from the village of Findhorn, which was not evacuated.

“It must have been like a hundred Guy Fawkes Days,” he said.  But he could find nobody who recalled seeing them.

It turns out a plaque on the beachfront at Nairn may tell the whole story.

Silent we came

Silent we left

To strike a blow for freedom

In the spring of 1940, with Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in a non-aggression pact, France overrun, and Norway in German hands, Great Britain feared it might be invaded from the north, along the eastern coast of Scotland.

Few military planners believed German forces would advance south to England from such a landfall. But with Northern Scotland occupied, the important ship-harboring Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands in German hands, and British forces damaged from the losses evacuating Dunkirk, some speculated the pressure to make peace with Hitler might be irresistible.

To help prevent that, a massive campaign to protect Britain’s coasts was begun. In Scotland, and especially along the Moray Firth, much of it remains.

By the summer that year, planners concluded that 125 miles of coast needed defending by means of physical obstacles and armaments. These included concrete cubes, ranging from 3.5 to 5 feet high; tall metal scaffolding; pillboxes for men with small arms; large pillboxes with 4-inch naval artillery pieces; tank ditches;  mined beach exits; poles to prevent beaches and mudflats from becoming landing grounds for enemy gliders; floating barriers with old herring nets attached to foul the propellers of landing craft; and tons of barbed wire.

The part of the coast I’m walking along has some of the longer unbroken stretches where such defenses were built.  They include 4.5 miles east of Nairn, 7 miles along Burghead Bay, and 2 miles on the west side of Lossiemouth and 9 miles on the east.

The most obvious of these today are the concrete cubes.  You can see them in the distance here.

Many are exactly where they were poured 75 years ago. Some are crumbling because of salt in the concrete.  Erosion and evolution of the shoreline has brought some onto the beach and into the water.

Some were reinforced with steel bars, and have loops protruding from the tops, where barbed wire would be attached.

There is a wide variety of pillboxes, most specified by military architects, although some apparently with local design modifications. There were supposed to be two every 1,000 yards. Some were “bulletproof,” others “shell-proof,” and specs said they should have a perimeter of barbed wire at 40 and 60 yards to prevent the approach of flame throwers.

A motley crew of builders constructed the defenses. They included civilian contractors, British army units, members of engineering battalions from the Polish Army in exile, and village boys.

One of the last, Donnie Stewart (about whom I’ll write a later post), was 10 at the time. The war brought great excitement (and some tragedy) to Lossiemouth, the village where he grew up. In the fall of 1940, he and his schoolmates spent a lot of time watching the defenses being constructed. The concrete was mixed on site and shovelled into wooden forms. The boys’ job was to find flat stones to put at the bottom of the forms to keep the concrete from leaking out too much.

Mr. Stewart recalled that one day the officer supervising a crew chewed his men out in an incomprehensible tongue for scratching their initials into the wet cement at the top of a cube. He concluded years later they were probably from a Welsh labor battalion.

Some of the blocks show evidence of having their height raised by a second pour. That was apparently by order of an Admiral Dreyer, who visited the Burghead-area defenses in August 1940. The source for this, and most of the information in this post, is the book: “If Hitler Comes / Preparing for Invasion: Scotland 1940” (2013) buy Gordon Barclay.

The effectiveness of the barriers was formally tested in May, 1941. It was found they delayed the advance of tanks by only 70 to 90 seconds, and were easily destroyed with one or two shots from a tank’s guns. In May, 1942, the order came down to stop building them.

Fifteen miles between Findhorn and Kingston (which I passed through yesterday) was supposed to have wire-and-steel scaffolding barriers. None were built, although 85 percent of the material was delivered to the beach. You can’t see any of it now.

The anti-glider poles are still visible in some places, as in this tidal mudflat area.

Poles put on the beach didn’t prove stable if they were just placed holes dug in the sand. To solve that problem, the crews buried a steel barrel filled with concrete and then placed a  pole in it. You can still find pole stubs, with the outline of the barrel at the level of the sand.

On some popular beaches the concrete barriers were eventually removed. Jean Turner, a retired surgeon whom I met last year and who grew up in the coastal village of Portsoy, recalled that when she was girl “we used to use the spaces between them as changing rooms and picnic spots.” (Jean, at 76, is this year’s senior Challenger.)

Less picturesque and romantic than ruined castles, they will nevertheless be here for a long time to testify to the belligerent history of this beautiful coast.

The walk from Nairn to Forres was along an empty beach that turned to grassy mudflats cut through by meandering streams.

Along the beach in many places were wooden poles in states of decay. Some were mere stubs, a few were 15 feet tall.

I had seen these since Fort George. At first I thought they were poles erected early in World War II to prevent  gliders from landing safely during an invasion. I had read that such poles remained visible, 75 years after they were placed.

It turns out, however, that most of what I saw in rows going out into the firth were remnants of the armature of salmon nets. Vast numbers of Atlantic salmon once came down the coast seeking their natal rivers–the Ness, Findhorn, Spey–that flowed north out of the hills and mountains of the central Highlands.

The right to set nets along specified stretches of the coast has been bought up by estates and sporting companies in recent decades, I was told.  Those owners, in turn, have closed the commercial fishery in favor of a sport one.  All that remains of the working salmon industry are the poles.

The beach was lovely.  When a high dune appeared on the water side of the hard-packed marsh, I climbed it and descended to the sand on the other side.

I hadn’t seen a soul since passing two women on their daily, four-hour dog walk hours earlier.

There are always things to see on a beach. I’m happy to report I didn’t pick up a single stone.

I knew the long dune was a peninsula of high ground on a tidal marsh.  I also knew it would end long before the land did.  The map showed a channel of water through the mud flats. As the tide was more than half-way out, I figured the channel would be crossable, or at least wadeable. (The black target-like icon is my position when I went over the dune).

Near the end of the dune I encountered a colony of seals. There were at least a hundred up on the beach. They took to the water in batches and looked at me with great curiosity.  Here are some seal tracks, going to sea

and coming back to the beach.

Wanting to save a little time, I didn’t go all the way to the end of the dune. I climbed back up on it, expecting to see mudflats with a channel running through it. Instead, I saw a vast bay, completely uncrossable, despite what the map suggested.

There was only one conclusion: I had to walk all the way back.

This was discouraging news for someone with a pack on his back. I felt like sitting down and calling an Uber. Or the Coast Guard. Or something.  But there was no choice. I started walking–this time into the wind.

The mudflatted area (now covered in water) also had poles in it. I later found out they, in fact, were the anti-glider defenses. They were so remote that they hadn’t been scavenged for firewood or fence posts after the war, as had happened to those closer to settlements.

There were many tributary channels feeding the head of the bay when I finally reached it. I stepped and jumped over as many as I could, until I finally decided that as an alternative to backtracking even farther I’d start wading.

This was a bigger decision than it might seem because it required taking off the boots and getting them into the pack, which wasn’t easy. However, it felt good to cool off my feet.

This stretch of coast was bisected by the mouth of the River Findhorn where it met the Moray Firth. I’d planned to walk up to the western edge of the mouth and then turn upriver a mile or two to a bridge.

However, having done a lot of walking I hadn’t planned on, I decided to take a more direct route–namely, on logging roads through a huge forest. It saved me at least a mile.

At one point there was a traffic jam–two logging trucks and one walker, all stopped.

I eventually got out and crossed the River Findhorn at the Broom of Moy, which is quite close to the Snab of Moy, Wester Moy, and Moy Ho.

The next day, I walked downstream on the other side of the river, back toward the mouth of the Findhorn.  I eventually got to the village of Findhorn, which lay right across the place where I’d been the day before.

I went to the local museum, where two volunteers–Sue Finnegan and Tim Negus–were most helpful in showing me around and answering lots of questions. Sue was one of many people I’d corresponded with by e-mail while doing research months earlier.  Tim knew a huge amount of local history and archaeology.

Nearby, Sue’s husband, also named Tim, was manning the Ice House, a historical structure rehabilitated in the early 2000s.

In the old days, at the end of each winter ice would flow down the Findhorn, piling up on the shore. Enterprising people built a stone building, most of it below grade, with a hole in the roof, through which tons of ice was shoveled. The ice lasted nine months. Fishermen caught salmon, packed them in ice in wooden boxes, and shipped them to London. This worked until more than half-way through the 20th century.

Tim took me up on the berm behind the ice house and pointed out another, rounded-top ice house next to it.

Alas, it was soon time to close up.

He lowered the Scottish flag, and I walked on.

So here’s a little about the Moray Coast, much of it thanks to the book, “Portrait of  The Moray Firth” (1977) by Cuthbert Graham, former weekend editor of The Press and Journal, a newspaper in Inverness.

The Moray Firth is an isosceles triangle lying on one of its equal sides. It’s roughly 100 miles from Inverness to Fraserburgh (where the land makes a 90-degree turn south), and 100 miles along the southwest-to-northeast diagonal whose apex is Inverness. The other side, which connects the headlands in Caithness and Aberdeenshire, is about 75 miles long.

Moray Firth is a drowned river system.  The upper side of the triangle–which is to say, the northern shore of the firth–likes along a geological fault line that includes Loch Ness, the Caledonian Canal and various other lochs down to the Firth of Lorne on the Atlantic Coast.

Creating Loch Ness’s fabled depth, the rift is like a deep saber slash running diagonally across the Highlands.  In the Moray Firth, it is evident as a trench, known locally as “the Trink,” a half-mile wide and15 fathoms below the rest of the sea bed.

For reasons that are not obvious to me, the coast gets less rain that other parts of the Highlands and points west.  Nairn, which is the next town of any size east of Inverness,  gets about 25 inches of rain a year, half that of Stornoway in the Outer Hebrides.

Neolithic people built many tombs, some of which remain as stone circles or ring cairns, the ground-level outlines of the burial chambers.  However, they are easier to find on the map than on the landscape.

After the start of the Common Era, the Picts were carving stones with pictographic inscriptions, and later, after their conversion, with Christian and Celtic crosses.  They left no written language, and the meaning of many of their stones can only be guessed.  One of the better known and later ones, Sueno’s Stone, which I walked by, is thought to depict the course of a conquest, culminating in the beheading of the vanquished.

By 875 the Norse had conquered the land north of the northern side of the firth, which remained a Norse province for 350 years.  The southern side of the firth was a buffer between the Scandinavian invaders and the Scottish kingdom to the south.  Its rulers sometimes claimed, or usurped, the Scottish throne.

The most famous was Macbeth, who in 1040 killed the Scottish King Duncan.  Duncan had killed the brother of Macbeth’s wife, Gruoch (whose name Shakespeare wisely chose not to use), in order to consolidate power.  Duncan died not in Inverness Castle, but at a blacksmith shop near Elgin, inland from the mid-Coast.  Macbeth was subsequently killed, in 1057, by Malcolm Canmore, who later unified Scotland.

This is Macbethland.  I’m walking near Cawdor and through Macduff.  I’m spending the night at a B&B in Forres, the village that is the site of the scene in Act 1 in which a wounded sergeant reports Macbeth’s battlefield heroism to King Duncan.  Birnam Wood and Dunsinane Hill, however, are farther away.

Various wars and battles, both religious and secular, occurred along the Moray Coast over the centuries. The 1746 Battle of Culloden, the last great battle fought on British soil,  ended the Jacobite Rising and began the legal suppression of the clan system.

The coast received people during the Highland Clearances in the late 1700s when subsistence farmers were replaced with sheep on huge, often absentee-owned, estates.  At various times the area’s industries included flax spinning, herring and salmon fishing, whisky distilling, and farming.  In the 20th century, there were a number of big military installations, most now closed.  Golf-based tourism appears to be important today.

In its western and central segments  the Moray Coast has sand beaches that are a quarter-mile from wrack line to water at low tide.  Yesterday, as I walked from Findhorn to Burghead, I turned around and saw a gigantic anvil-based cloud illuminated by the late afternoon sun.  (The sun which wouldn’t set for another four hours).

About the middle of the coast cliffs start to appear, and they eventually dominate the eastern end of the coast.

National Geographic Traveler magazine in 2010 asked a panel of 340 experts to rate coastal destinations for “authenticity and stewardship.” The Moray Coast was 11 out or 99 (tied with Italy’s Cinque Terre).

It’s a placed that moved the aforementioned Mr. Graham to write:  “Nothing in fact can be so exhilarating as to climb up over the Spartan uplands of Aberdeenshire or Banffshire till one reaches the windswept  plateau overlooking the coiffed coast .  .  .  where a breeze from the north-west is ruffling the manes of the waves’ white horses while, on a really good day, the thin blue line of the Sutherland hills is faintly visible on the water’s far horizon.”

I can’t attest to all of that.  But it’s pretty nice so far.

I was the only guest in John Ross’s B&B, which he operates more or less when he wants. He makes money installing closed-circuit TV systems. His wife died a dozen years ago and he lives alone. His four children–all boys–are long out of the house.

He also plays the guitar, banjo and mandolin, and is the creator of a weekly live-music night in Ardersier, a village of about 1,500 people. Unfortunately, it was the night before I arrived.

On the wall of his kitchen are photographs of relatives going back several generations. One of them was an uncle, Donnie Ross. He was a sniper with the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders during World War II. He was one of the 10,000 members of the Highland Division that surrendered in St. Valery on the French coast near Dieppe, on June 12, 1940, when it was clear a Dunkirk-like rescue wasn’t possible.

He survived transfer by foot and cattle car to Poland, and then five years as a prisoner of war. He might not have survived the first day, his nephew said, if a fellow soldier (also from Ardersier and also named Donnie Ross) hadn’t thrown his friend’s sniper rifle in a pond and cut the sniper insignia off his uniform. Otherwise the Germans might have shot him on the spot.

Donnie (the uncle) had been a farmer, and worked on a farm in Poland. “That’s probably the other thing that saved him. There was more food,” John said. Every five years, he returned to St. Valery to reunite with other survivors. He died a few years ago in his upper 90s.

With military matters in mind, I headed out in the drizzle once more, with the destination Fort George, an 18th-century fort at a headland two miles to the north. It’s a historical site and also an active garrison, with a small number of soldiers still stationed there. It was built after the Jacobite Rising of 1746 and has never been under attack.

It’s beautifully maintained.

Out of the rain under an arcade I met Glenn Lawson, who was putting the final paint job on a WOMBAT anti-tank gun, one of the few left in existence. It has an American-made 50-mm spotting rifle (which fired phosphorus-tipped tracer bullets) mounted on top of a 120-mm artillery piece.

He’d retired from the British Army as a sergeant major after 25 years of service. He was one of the last people to fire the gun, in 1986 when the  British military installation in Belize was closed. Seven WOMBATs were dumped in a lagoon by helicopters, and this one was taken home for historical purposes.  It had spent much of the last three decades incorrectly assembled and out in the weather.

This was Lawson’s fourth trip up from his home in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, in England, to work on it. He was almost done.

By this time it was mid-afternoon and I’d hardly started walking. So I turned in the audio guide, left the fort, and made my way to the beach.

Almost immediately, I came across what I believe is the remains of a pillbox, part of the network of defenses built along the northern coast of Scotland during World War II. I expect to see more of these.

The tide was out. The views were beautiful. My feet got wet.

On the outskirts of Nairn, my destination, I had to cross an annoying stretch of bogland between the beach and high ground. I was glad to finally see this.

The caravan park and campground was on the far side of the village. It wanted £17 to pitch a tent. That seemed a bit high, so I staggered on, out past the wastewater treatment plant to the dunes east of town and found my own place. It was again after 8.

One of the aspirations of this trip is to walk the Moray Coast–roughly 100 miles, from Inverness to Fraserburgh–within view, and if possible within touch, of the water.

The Moray Coast Trail, a recreational path for walkers and bicyclists, runs for only half the distance, and isn’t always on the water.  Much of the rest of the shoreline is industrial park, military reservation, nature preserve, and private farms.  How much will be accessible, even given Scotland’s remarkable public access law, remains to be seen.

The first test was at the northern end of Inverness.

I walked into town on the end of the Great Glen Way, crossing on pedestrian bridges over the River Ness, which connects the Caledonian Canal and Loch Ness to the Moray Firth.  On an island in the river I finally saw the Loch Ness monster, come ashore.

I passed an old block of stone cottages.

I passed a World War I monument under renovation.  I always stop for these.  This one says it was dedicated in 1922 “By Colonel the Mackintosh of Mackintosh / Lord lieutenant of Inverness-shire.”

It listed an unbelievable number of engagements.  About 750 men from Inverness died in the war.

Inverness has several handsome bridges over the river.

The route to the much larger Kessock Bridge, which spans the confluence of fresh and salt water, goes through an industrial area.  In this day and age that means more storing and selling than making.

This would be a first-strike site for some of the Challengers I’ve met in past years, who view wind farming in the Highlands as an abomination. These objects, which I first thought were some sort of boat, are turbine blades.

These are pieces of the tower.  It’s hard to show scale, but they’re gigantic.

I walked past the home stadium of the Inverness Caledonian Thistle Football Club.  Soon after that I got to the entrance of a landfill, which is still active, although the sign out front says it stopped taking general refuse a dozen years ago. The driveway went by a building next to a raised truck-weighing ramp. Parallel to it was the exit lane, at grade level. That’s the route I took. I could see the hair on the top of the head of the man minding the scales. He didn’t turn.

There was a slight smell of garbage, but most in evidence were masses of residential trash bins, recycling boxes, and bulk trash containers full of broken bicycles and other metal goods.

I walked down the road until it stopped. To my surprise, at the end was a small building and a “Highway Maintenance” truck parked next to it. Fifty yards away a man was standing; possibly he was urinating.

I figured that if I got past him, every step would make it harder for him to catch up and confront me. So I kept walking into the field of wet grass and gorse. I didn’t look back.

Soon I was at a rip-rap shore at a cove that was mostly mudflats, as the tide was out.

I was where I wanted to be.  I cut across the mudflats where I could, but frequently came to places where a trickling tributary made the water just deep enough to ensure that over five hours my feet became thoroughly wet.

I passed a golf course, which had several holes paralleling the shore. For the next several miles–long past the links–I saw golf balls in the water. At least 50. Some in groups, carried up the coast by tide and wind.

I walked and walked, and eventually got to my destination, Ardesier.

It had once been a fishing village, with 50 boats taking Kessock herring  and salmon coming and going from the fresh-water tributaries. I’d heard there was a tradition, here and elsewhere on the coast where the tide exposes huge mudflats, of fishermen’s wives carrying their husbands on their backs across the mudflats to their anchored boats, so the men wouldn’t have wet feet at the start of the day. It seemed hard to believe, but a historical marker I later passed confirmed it.

In any case, it was time for me to slow down.

It had rained on and off all day. I was very happy to make landfall about 8 p.m. at a bed and breakfast run by a man named John Ross. The first day of bushwhacking had worked out.

I spent nearly the whole open period of the one-room Beauly library (10 a.m. to 12.30 p.m.) using the Internet and listening to the chitchat between the half-dozen visitors and the librarian.

Then it was down the road again. I passed a horse. Or perhaps it was a donkey.

I passed something that was marked Moniak Castle on the map. The wall was covered with vines. This door hasn’t been closed in a while. I peeked into the driveway but didn’t see a castle.

I eventually got to a forest with a small parking area and the trail head of several short hikes. My route, however, had me going up a hilly road and into the woods in another direction.

I did this, but soon found myself on a gravel road not on the map and, according to the GPS signal, not on my route. Bushwhacking to get back to the path seemed like a lot of work, so I decided to continue on the road as long as it was going uphill, as I knew I had to go over the top of a ridge eventually.

By this point it was drizzling, which it continued to do for the next five hours. The road eventually terminated at a large chalet-style building surrounded by construction equipment and split wood covered with a blue tarp. There were also a few old cars, but none that appeared to have been recently parked.

I walked onto the back porch and considered taking the pack off and eating a snack. A skeleton key was in an old lock in the back door. I looked in and saw carpentry tools and two pairs of boots. I tried the door. It was locked, so I turned the key, unlocked it and stuck my head in. I called hello several times. I heard music coming from upstairs and called again.  No answer.

I decided I didn’t want to go tramping up the stairs and surprise whoever was there, so I headed off through all the stuff to the open hillside, going in the direction I knew the path must lie. The ground was wet and it was cold. I stopped and put on mittens. I found the path eventually, crested the hill and came down.  It was a bleak and beautiful landscape.

The path eventually connected with the Great Glen Way, a walking and biking trail that goes from Fort William to Inverness in a diagonal across  the Highlands. As I was coming down the final hill into the outskirts of town I saw about 20 people running up the hill in the rain. I asked if they were a triathlon club. One of them managed to get out: “We’re a hill-running club.” They passed me again, running downhill. And then again, running uphill.

By the time I arrived at a “caravan park” in Bught Park on the south end of town my boots were soaked and I was pretty cold. I checked in and paid my £10. The place had at least a hundred trailers, and in a separate area, five tents. Three of them were occupied by Challengers, and in one of them was Anthony Driscoll, whom I’d walked with earlier.

Soon after I set the tent up the rain stopped. After I got the boots off and different pants on, and the freeze-dried “Moroccan couscous, with chicken and mild spices” under my belt, I felt better. After dinner, I invited Anthony and another Challenger named Mark Janes over to visit.

Anthony brought a half-bottle of wine, Mark a wee dram of Glenlivet, and I served honey and ginseng tea with a side of chocolate bar.  Anthony told us about one of his early Challenges when he went over seven Munros in a day and was caught in a snowstorm that turned his boots into shorty skis, making the descents adventurous.

Mark talked about moving from southern England to Tain, north of Inverness, four years earlier with his wife (who was with him on the Challenge, but had gone to bed). They have 40 acres of land, from which they cut Christmas greens for income. The only thing Mark said he didn’t like about his new home was the period after New Year’s, when the holidays are over and the sunlight starts to fade at 2 in the afternoon. That’s when he and Carol go to Morocco for a month.  Not for warmth, but for light.

There was still a little light left for us, however, when we said goodnight at 10.30 and headed for our tents.

On one of the early days I walked about four hours through a forest and down a glen until I came to a bothy.

Bothies are buildings open for public use, the public in this case being walkers quite far from civilization.  For that reason, an expected level of respect and responsibility generally obtains.  They aren’t trashed and covered with graffiti.  In many cases, they have a small supply of emergency provisions–a few tins of food, the remains of propane fuel bottle, candles, occasionally even an unfinished bottle of whisky.

They are almost always owned by the “estate” on which they lie, which is to say to owners of vast tracts of land in the Highlands.  Estates all have names (often ancient ones) and are the size of townships or counties.  The owners are individuals, or families.  Rich, of course, and sometimes foreign.

This is Luipmaldrig bothy, as seen from the stream (“burn” over here) I crossed to get to it.

Bothies are usually former farmhouses or tenant cottages.  They vary in size and architectural sophistication.  This was one of the bigger ones I’d seen.

It was well kept, with a bright and recent paint job.

The front door led to a stairway, and to the right to a door to a room with two wooden storage bins (one assuredly for wood and peat).  There was the remains of a cast iron stove in the fireplace.

Finishing a tea break were Jean and Tony Pitchforth, an English couple who’d done the Challenge numerous times. Tony, a retired physician, at 75 was a year younger than the most senior walker.  They were an example of the remarkable number of fit and adventurous older people who year after year come out for this event.

We talked a while and shared some gorp before they moved on.  I explored the house. Upstairs at the head of the stairs was a mounted deer trophy with a single strand of spiderweb between two prongs of its antlers.

I soon left, too, and headed across a bridge onto the south side off the River Orrin.  It turned into the Orrin Reservoir, which was river-like much of its way because there hadn’t been much rain recently. .

There was no path on the south side of the reservoir.  I was apprehensive about this when I drew up my route.  The estimable Roger Hoyle, who provided this route–he’s the father of a Times of London correspondent, whom I met on a visit to Moscow three years ago–told me that a person’s map-and-compass skills had to be “up to scratch” to take this unmarked route. (Mine are adequate, nothing more).

He had walked it several Challenges ago when it had been raining for three days.  The sky was so foggy he couldn’t see the reservoir as he walked.   To make matters worse, the streams coming out of the hills from the south–water flows north in this region of Scotland–were “in spate,” which is to say, in flood.  As a consequence, Roger and his companion had to walk upstream (and uphill) every time they came to one in order to find a safe place safe to cross.  It was a memorably exhausting day, he recalled.

It was a memorably exhausting day for me, too.   And I was walking under relatively clear skies with the streams low.

I passed Jean and Tony pitching their tent, briefly considered stopping there, but moved on.

There were things to see along the way.  Because the streams were low, what they’d excavated by their flow was visible.  Ancient parts of trees, buried in the peat for centuries, appeared like the bleached bones of extinct ruminants.

Walking over heather, grass, and sphagnum moss for hours is exhausting.  It’s like walking on ground covered with sprung mattresses. (Not, of course, that I’ve ever done that).

The sun was going down, and I was still going up and down, when I decided I didn’t have to get as far as I’d planned that day. So I looked for a place to stop.

Coming down a steep slope I descried a stream.  On the near side we’re a few small terraces of grass.  On the far side was nothing but steep heather.  I stopped and chose one of the terraces.

This violated one of the rules of Scottish hill-walking, which is that if you camp beside a stream, camp on the far side.  That’s so if it rains in the night and the water rises, you’re already on the side you want to be on when you take off the next day.

I, however, had no choice.  In fact, I barely had room for the tent.  This was the tame equivalent of the cliff-hanging “campsites” that rock climbers sometimes must create.

It was hard to tell which end of the tent was higher than the other.  I actually changed my mind and switched in the middle of the night.  You can see the interior lines aren’t plumb.

It didn’t rain in the night.  I crossed the stream easily.  And I walked on.

What’s underfoot is often beautiful.  Here’s a picture.

I passed another bothy off the trail and saw from a distance a figure in black outside.  I didn’t investigate and walked on.  Soon enough, “Butch Cassidy”-like, the person was gaining on me.

I got to a place where the path ended and trackless navigation was necessary, and he caught me.

His name was Anthony Driscoll (pronounced “Antony”), and he was a semi-ultralight serious walker.  He works in the quality-assurance department of Bentley Motors’s parts division.  Bentley doesn’t make its own parts; it has 800 suppliers, and assembles the cars.

Anthony has a wife and a 12-year-old daughter, and he does the Challenge with their indulgence.  He moves fast.  Several years ago, he started one three days after everyone else.  It never takes him two weeks.  On this day, he wanted company.  So we conferred on compass bearings and headed off over the heather.

He was a good companion.  He even volunteered to take a break at one point.  He smoked a small cigar and shared his water, as I had none.

I was heading to a bed-and-breakfast in the town of Beauly.  Anthony, harder core, was walking just south of Beauly to a camp spot.

Soon we approached the village.  This Highland cow was waiting to welcome us.

Soon we parted ways.  But it wasn’t the last I saw of him.