If you head to Newburgh Beach, try spotting the following features and get maximum points !
A Hidden Dome
A difficult one right at the start of the hunt. What is it? The lid of an Ice House, where salmon caught in the estuary would have been stored. (50 extra points if you can find the old ice pond where the ice was made. Hint – its on the golf course)
20 POINTS
Black Huts
An easy one ! The fishing huts owned by anglers and local people.
10 POINTS
Blue Doors
Another easy one. Newburgh Lifeboat Station. Originally launched by horse and cart. It was the first lifeboat station in Scotland, and opened in 1828.
10 POINTS
Wrecked
What’s left of the Leith trawler ‘Keremma’, left here to rot in 1976. Try to catch it at low tide !
15 POINTS
First Class Post
Getting harder – the old navigation posts that helped the coal barges find the centre channel at high tide as they went up to the Quay.
20 POINTS
Big Guns
This is the seaward gun emplacement of a pair that sit up in the dunes. The guns defended the entrance to the Ythan from invading boats in WW2.
20 POINTS
(+ 30 POINTS for the hidden twin up in the dunes)
Protecting the Back Door
Two ways the twin gun emplacements were protected from attack from the rear: a pill box and a network of scaffold tank traps. (50 extra points of you hunt in this valley for the foundations of several radio huts and control huts)
20 POINTS
Stumped ?
What’s left of the amazing beach nets that were used to catch salmon. In use up to the 1990s. The nets were complex mazes made of netting that would direct fish swimming along the coast into the centre of the maze from which they could not escape.
50 POINTS
Dragons Teeth
Concrete blocks like this were laid all along the east coast of Scotland on every beach to stop invading tanks and landing craft in WW2. These cross Newburgh beach form the dunes to the sea, and they used to have a wire from the last one strung across the mouth of the estuary, cutting it off to boats. These often get covered in sand, so …
50 POINTS
Very Rare
Some of the blocks, the ones right along the beach and parallel to the dunes, have pictures and words carved into them by the soldiers that cast the blocks. There is one that says quite rude things about Hitler, and another showing a bomb falling out of the sky. You have to come on a day when the sand has cleared the blocks, and then hunt very hard to find the carved ones.