A couple of weeks ago we decided to drive to Kingsbarns, a small coastal village in Fife, quite famous amongst golfers as the course there is used for final qualifying for The Open when it’s at St Andrews. We had only been to Kingsbarns beach once before and I was lucky enough to find some fossils amongst the stones there. There were also several lobster creels lying around on the beach, a bit bashed about, obviously they had been thrown up by the recent wild weather and high seas. I quite fancied taking one home as a decoration in the garden but they weigh a ton, so I decided against it.

If you look carefully at the photo below you should be able to see snow-clad mountains in the distance.

This time though the beach was clear of any really interesting debris, and I didn’t find any fossils either, I must just have been really lucky the last time. But there was someone actually surfing in the North Sea! We had to go and investigate.

Of course we ended up getting into conversation with a lovely woman called Karen, mother of the surfer. She thought that standing on the edge of a Scottish beach around lunchtime was an improvement on the 5 am starts she used to have when her son Andrew Robertson was a competitive swimmer, before he was lured to the delights of surfing. The dedication of some mothers never fails to impress me!

Cornwall is the place to be if you’re keen on surfing and needing lots of practice for competitions, failing that Tiree is good apparently but I imagine that is quite a bit colder than down south. The North Sea wasn’t too cold according to Andrew, it’s worse in April. We often get colder weather in the spring than in November, we’re much more likely to get snow in March or April than in November or December. Apparently the sea is at its warmest in November as it hasn’t started to cool down.

The rockface below looks like a whole layer of it has been burnt, carbonised somehow – maybe even a layer of coal, evidence of some sort of geological happening in the very distant past anyway.

We were all wrapped up against the cold but it was quite balmy in early November and we ended up being too hot. We walked to the right and the left of the car park , previously we had only gone to the right but the left side is actually the more interesting part of the beach. There are lots of huge stones there, a couple of them look like standing stones and and the others seem to have been arranged in straight lines. It doesn’t look at all natural, I’d love to know more about the stone formations there. You can see more images of the beach here.

You can see Andrew Robertson in the video below, where the waves were much better for surfing.

Andrew Robertson HOME BREAK FOR XMAS 2015 from Robbie Robertson on Vimeo.