Near The Chapel

At low tide. At the upper top, right, notice the rusty remains of the two large iron bolts that secured the heavy backing-up wooden beam to the notch, cut in the rocks.  Time and the weather have disintegrated the wooden beam.

 

 

A very important part of living our everyday lives is getting rid of our trash.

 

Earlsferry in my early years had a very unique way to make our garbage vanish.

 

In those days there were no wheelie bins, no black plastic bags, no giant diesel engined  hydraulic automated trash compacting lorries, no land fill site.

 

The trash we generated disappeared in quite a marvelous way. The sea gobbled it up. The Rumbling Goat caused every last tiny bit of our rubbish to simply vanish..

 

Each house had a rubbish bucket that was put out on the street on Monday mornings. If you had items such as old iron bed rails or whatever you just placed them along side of the bucket.  In these days with  different lifestyles and eating habits people generated only a fraction of the trash that's created today.

 

At the appointed hour our waste disposal man with Nellie his Clydesdale horse and cart, started their round of the village. 

 

When the cart got full Nellie knew where to go. Nellie headed west to Chapel Green where the roadway, instead of being a turn-around as it is now, went past the Chapel and continued straight on down over the rocks to the sea to the place that's called the Rumbling Goat.  The Rumbling Goat is a natural sea scoured channel about twenty feet wide and almost as deep. The channel is curved and dead ends into a small cave or cavern. As the tide rushes in waves flow along the channel with great hydraulic force and ram into the cavern to pound whatever is in there to fragments. As the wave covers the mouth of the cavern the air inside is compressed and with a great woosh the sea explodes outward.

 

Just above the end of the channel was fastened a heavy wooden beam. When Nellie got there with her load she knew how to turn around and back up the cart until the wheels were against the beam. At this point Bob pulled a pin then heaved on a big lever bar and the cart up-ended sending all of the rubbish down to the floor of the channel. The incoming tide caused the waves in the channel to pound the deposited material against the end of the cavern with repeated hammer-like blows until everything disintegrated into oblivion. It's strange but not one visible bit of material exited the channel. Things made of metals immediately started to rust and corrode and it wasn't long before the salt water  made them vanish. The big exception was lead and there was quite a lot of it. Most all of the old Earlsferry houses had lead water pipes and plumbers were always replacing and repairing pipes that froze and burst in the wintertime. Sheet lead was also the material of choice for roof flashing. The lead didn't linger for long in the Rumbling Goat as Earlsferry boys were always collecting it to mold, sinkers for sea fishing lines, fishing lures (Spruels) and lead keels for our self made model yachts. I had molds to make toy soldiers, and toy animals and this was another use that I made of the lead that I salvaged.  In time I had maybe a hundred toy soldiers each one of which I very carefully painted. The animals I cast were elephants, lions, tigers, kangaroos, monkeys, bears and several others. Lead was also the material of choice for the weighting of wooden head golf clubs.

 

About 1936 our waste disposal man retired and Nellie went out to pasture. This event, which coincided with the dawn of the age of disposable plastics, became the end of the era of our rubbish ending up in the Rumbling Goat.  A new system of collecting the local refuse was instituted by a landfill (The Coup) being created a half  mile away up the Ferry Road, alongside of where the railway line used to be and just beyond the  second fairway of the 9 hole Elie golf course.

 

 Nellie got replaced by a motorized vehicle.

 

It's fun  to go to the Rumbling Goat, especially on stormy days, to see the waves rush into the foam filled channel and the noisy sea blasting back out of the hole.

 

As a remembrance of how life was in Earlsferry in days gone by the bolts and the heavy wooden beam should be replaced.