Torryburn

Robert Louis Stevenson's Nurse

Travelling westward along the northern shore of the Forth we come, at a bend in the road, to the village of Torryburn. First the church, then the cottages, and then the Forth slapping the rocks at the roadside and the whole landscape opening out into an exciting seascape.

The village street twists narrowly between the tile-roofed cottages to the water's edge. In this village was born on 15th May, 1822, Alison Cunningham, nurse to Robert Louis Stevenson, and we can still see at the eastern end of the main street the house in which she spent her childhood. Of Alison Stevenson wrote, when he dedicated to her his Child's Garden of Verses,

For all you pitied, all you bore
In sad and happy days of yore,
My second mother, my first wife,
The angel of my infant life.

From the village we can look across to Preston Island lying in the centre of Torrie Bay. Most romantic the island appears from this distance. The ruins on it seem to be the remains of some ancient castle or monastery. But they have a more prosaic explanation. At the beginning of the last century wealthy Sir Robert Preston, 6th baronet, of Valleyfield, decided to work coal on the island. He sank three pits, installed steam plant, and built cottages for the colliers, and laid a conduit from the shore to supply fresh water to the island. His efforts were, however, profitless, and following an explosion in 1811 when several lives were lost, he decided to abandon the enterprise. He had lost £30,000 on the island adventure but he was still determined to make it a place of industry and established salt pans there. When he died in 1834 the salters remained, living a gypsy life on the island, but eventually when suspicions were aroused that spirits were being illegally distilled there it was vacated and has never since been inhabited.

Grave of a Witch

The ancient estate of Torrie is now a famous golf course. Immediately behind the village, among the trees fringing the golf course, we see a stone on which the Devil sat. At least the depressions in the rock, we are told, are the imprint of the Satanic haunches.

A rock of more authentic history we see on the foreshore a little west of the town. This rock, marked with an iron ring, is the grave-stone of the witch, Lilias Adie, who died in prison in Dunfermline in 1704, and was, as an excommunicated person, buried within high-water mark. Prosecutions for witchcraft were waning at Torrybum when Lilias was accused by the minister and kirk session at the be-ginning of the 18th century, but prior to that time, even as early as the 16th century, there is evidence of many women having been tortured and burned for witchcraft in the village.

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