North Berwick

My home town is better than yours. Don’t take my word for it. This month North Berwick was crowned ‘best place to live’, at least in Scotland, thanks in part to its good schools, community spirit and low crime. The news hasn’t come as a surprise to locals — it’s a town perched between an extinct volcano and the North Sea on the south shore of the Firth of Forth, so we know it’s something special. But there’s more to us than pretty streets, beaches and fish and chips.

The first thing to note about North Berwick is that it is in Scotland. This may seem obvious, but it’s often confused with Berwick-upon-Tweed, 40 miles south in England. Matters aren’t helped by Scots from — to borrow a phrase from President Trump — ‘serious Scotland’ who find North Berwick so ‘posh’ it basically counts as English.

It wasn’t always seen to be so grand. North Berwick had humble beginnings. The harbour was built in the 12th century to ferry pilgrims crossing the Firth of Forth to worship the relics of St Andrew in Fife. It hasn’t always been the ‘best place to live’ either, particularly if you were a woman in the 16th century. When the pilgrims stopped coming, the harbour is said to have fallen prey to black magic, with witches holding covens on Auld Kirk Green.That inspired Robert Burns to write ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ — and King James VI, who blamed local witches for the stormy weather he experienced sailing to Copenhagen to marry Princess Anne of Denmark, to mount an investigation that implicated 70 people and ended with torture and burnings at the stake.

Things started to look up again in the 1800s, when the Victorians offered the area a tourism boost — rebranding it a golfing destination (complete with the slogan ‘from pilgrim port to golf resort’).