"an unco place by night, unco by day"

Today was a beautiful day, and one for escaping, so we drove to Tantallon Castle on the East Lothian coast. I spent a fascinating hour exploring the vast ruin - it is definitely worth a trip - but the star of the visit was the clear view to the Bass Rock.

The Bass has remarkable human and natural histories. As early as 1497, James IV visited and stayed in the island's castle owned by Sir Robert Lauder of the Bass. It operated as a prison, holding Covenanters and Jacobite sympathisers; the latter managing to escape in 1691 and hold the island for three years for the Old Pretender.

Robert Louis Stevenson mentions the Bass in his Catriona of 1893:
"It was an unco place by night, unco by day; and there were unco sounds; of the calling of the solans, and the plash of the sea, and the rock echoes that hung continually in our ears."

The building in the photograph is David Stephenson's lighthouse, completed in 1902 and manned until 1988 before being converted for remote operation. I recall as a child going on holiday to North Berwick in the late 1960s, watching the service boats going out from the harbour to the Bass Lighthouse.

But perhaps the Bass Rock's greatest claim to fame is its own species of Gannet - Sula bassana. Some 40,00 breeding pairs nest on the Rock making it the largest Gannet rock colony in the world.