Duncan Harley

As the wreaths pile up alongside the War Memorials on this Remembrance Sunday and the bagpipes play Battle’s O’er at some 2,000 locations worldwide it seems appropriate to remember that Scotland has its own Little Cenotaph sitting, almost forgotten alongside the main railway-line between Newtonhill and Stonehaven. Muchalls is described in the 1884 edition of the Ordnance Gazetteer of Scotland  as: “ a village in Fetteresso parish, Kincardineshire, with a station on the North-Eastern section of the Caledonian railway, 5 miles NNE of Stonehaven, under which it has a telegraph and post office”. The tiny settlement nowadays lacks a station but still sits alongside the railway-line which transported the men from the towns and the villages of Aberdeenshire to the battlefields of France and Belgium. Charles Dickens is said to have described the village as a remarkably beautiful place and there are dark tales of a long-lost smuggler’s cave, haunted by a Green Lady, linking Muchals C...