Sea Coal

In our household I was always the one to be first out of bed in the mornings. In my teen years this was usually about four o'clock or so.  Being first up it became my job to clean out the fireplace from the remnants of the previous evening's fire then set and light a new fire to heat the house in the morning.  For fuel we used almost entirely sea coal. Not many people know what sea coal is. It's coal that washes up on the beaches. There must be exposed beds of coal on the sea floor out in the Firth of Forth. After storms at sea, coal washes in and is to be found  along the high tide line.  There was never a lot of it at any one time or place on the beach but enough to supply the needs of those in the village who appreciated sea coal.  It was common practice to always carry a bag with you when you walked the beaches to carry home your black gold.

Sea coal is like no other type of coal. In appearance it's sparkling clean and shining jet black.   Fist size chunks are like large black diamonds.  In the fireplace it can be ignited by heating with the very minimum amount of kindling. Mined coal, which we also bought for heating the house, came from the Wellesley coal mine at Buckhaven and was delivered to us by a horse drawn coal lorry.  The coal seams of the Wellesley coal mine extended out under the Firth of Forth and although it was very good coal it did not have the properties of sea coal. Mined coal must first be heated to a relatively high temperature before it will give off gas that will ignite.  When mined coal is completely spent there will be a fair amount of residual ash.  The process of combustion of mined coal also generates a considerable amount of smoke and soot.  Hence the nickname of Auld Reekie bestowed on the town of Edinburgh before the days of North Sea oil. Sea coal has quite different properties. As sea coal is first heated it enters a semi liquid stage and bubbles as it's gases ignite.  It burns with an extremely hot flame and produces a clean flame that gives off a far greater amount of heat than mined coal. Burning so cleanly there is very little ash residue or chimney soot or smoke. When the fire has finally burned itself out, what's left in the fireplace is only a very small amount of powder.

In the long dark winter nights when the sea was loud it was the custom for Earlsferry boys to spend our evenings in a cave that we made at the east end of the Dome Park and just above the high tide mark. The back half of the cave was the natural rock face of the rising shoreline. To complete the cave we built up a rock wall on the seaward side and chinked the spaces between the stones to make the cave windproof. Towards the back of our structure was our sea coal fireplace.  We needed no other light.  We were absolute sea gypsies. Looking and thinking back to the 1930's when we spent our evenings like this we must have instinctively been going back to the ways of our ancient primeval ancestors.  The Elie boys did a similar thing by spending their winter evenings in the cave at the Ladies Tower.