With the long, cold month of January drawing to a close, we took a walk along the Aberdeenshire coast from the historic fishing town of Stonehaven just ten miles south of Aberdeen. It was still cold, but dry with little wind, the sea flat calm and the low sun of a northern winter’s afternoon casting its glow across the clifftops. The path climbs steadily upwards from Stonehaven’s harbour above the rocks and old fisherman’s cottages at Cowie, where tall poles once used to spread and dry the fishing nets still poke up awkwardly out of the communal green space like some ancient wooden henge.

We were making our way to an old Catholic chapel perched precariously high on the sandstone cliffs and once dedicated to the Pictish Saint Nathalan who is attributed to several of the early churches of Aberdeenshire. His treasure is said to have been buried wrapped in a bull’s hide somewhere between the old chapel and its outer wall. The extant building dates to the thirteenth-century – some six-hundred years after Saint Nathalan’s time – and is also known as the Chapel of Our Lady of the Storms, re-dedicated to Saint Mary in 1276. The ruins of Cowie Castle, built by the Scottish king Malcolm Canmore in the eleventh-century, are just a short distance to the south, passed as you approach the chapel from the direction of Stonehaven along the narrow clifftop path. 

We spent half an hour or so wandering around the chapel’s burial ground as the sun sank steadily toward the fields. An old yew tree and holly tree take up much of the chapel’s roofless interior, and its stone arches catching the low winter sun in the stillness of the late afternoon created that eerie sense of time’s suspension. We found no treasure, but there are the gravestones of local fisherman lost at sea and a memorial commemorating a crew of lifeboatmen who drowned in the February of 1874. The sun finally dipped out of view and we made our way back along the cliffs, the old fisherman’s cottages at Cowie shrouded in deepening shadow and the waves just audible amongst the rocks below.