Tyninghame Faces

There is something about Scottish beaches that capture a very specific mood.

In September 2025, I spent a month staying in Dunbar on my own. Apart from the occasional hello with people at local shops, I didn’t engage with anyone in person for that whole month.

What I did instead, was take myself to forests and beaches and up hills and along shorelines next to nuclear power plants.

Mike surrounded by miles of flat sand at low tide near Holy Island (technically England, but very near Dunbar).

On either end of the month of solitude I did have the company of friends hence the visual evidence of my presence in these spaces. So you’ll just have to believe me that the month in between was nothing but me on empty beaches and cliffs.

Scotland is reliably gorgeous. If you have an appreciation for solemn skies and a breeze that never leaves, you will be rewarded.

Even the nuclear power plant felt oddly in place. For someone who adores the movie Local Hero, this may seem hypocritical, but I have to be honest, I kind of fell in love with this building.

In this month, my most frequented spot was Tyninghame Beach. Tyninghame beach is often deserted as not everyone wants to fuss with getting there. There is a fifteen minute walk through a forest with little to no signage and many paths that will take you in other directions. As you exit the forest you walk along a wall of sea buckthorn with only a grassy hill in sight. The grass is long and the wind does nice things to it. You walk up the hill and as you round the top, the North Sea appears before you.

I would spend hours a day on this beach, lying flat on my belly and staring at the sand looking for the smallest possible shells I could find. Shells so small, you need a magnifying glass to realise they aren’t bits of sand. I would love to do a blog just on these shells and what it does to your mind, when you stare at sand for hours on end.

Anyway, on one of these visits I thought of King Midas. The story as I remember it is as follows:

King Midas is judging a music competition and declares that he prefers the sound of Pan’s pipe over Apollo. Apollo believes this is simply not possible and he decides the problem is Midas’ ears. So he turns them into donkey ears. King Midas is deeply embarrassed by his ears and covers them with a headdress. Of course at some point King Midas needs a haircut, so he makes the barber vow to never tell any person about this secret. When the barber sees the ass ears, it takes all of his will power not to laugh. After cutting Midas’ hair, the barber in desperation to share the secret runs to a meadow. Here, he digs a hole and shouts the secret into the sand. Laughing and relieved of this burden the barber goes home.

In the place where the secret was whispered, new reeds grow from the ground. And soon a breeze picks up and the reeds whisper the secret to each other and the wind carries the secret across the meadow to the other grasses and soon the whole land knows of King Midas’s secret.

Thank you Diana for this photo of me looking for teeny tiny shells on Tyninghame beach.

I decided that I also wanted to unburden myself. So I dug a hole in the sand and I told my own secret. Right next to where I told my secret there were some pebbles in the sand. Along with my love of shells, I have a great love of pebbles, especially beach pebbles. The colouration of these pebbles really struck me. And I knew instantly that I wanted to use them as a colour palette.

I took my little pebbles into a paint store and sat down with the entire range of Little Greene’s paint samples. After an hour I had decided on 8 colours (listed below).

In this series of faces, I have eight. Each inspired by a tiny pebble on a quiet windswept beach on the south-eastern coast of Scotland. Each carrying a part of my secret.

Birthday Garden

Purlins Bedroom