Our part of the coast was formed when Scotland lay south of the Equator. The climate was hot and very dry. A huge river flowed across the arid landscape leaving layers of sand and silt and gravel which, over millions of years, compacted to form a pebbly red sandstone. Over unimaginable time, the continent wheeled round and the river bed tilted out of the sea, cracking and sliding downhill, forming the buttresses and blowholes and tight inaccessible beaches that now edge the northern North Sea rim. The predominant background sound here is the soft roar of tons of multi-coloured egg stones being continually clawed and graded by the waves.

It was several months after I moved here that I realised the upturned boat mouldering away below was actually the carcass of a small whale. A humpback whale, in fact; an infant. A winter storm had left it on a ridge of sand and pebble at the foot of a steep, brambly slope. Depending on the tides, it sometimes sat proud of the beach on a pedestal of stones; at other times it was completely covered over.

Millions of years ago, a group of hoofed mammals left dry land and walked back into the water. Their tails turned into huge flukes; their legs disappeared into their sides; the apparatus between their mouth and ears dwindled. Now they move in an entirely different kinaesthetic environment, a world with its own depths and textures, its own time sequence, its own distances and tones.

The first thing a newborn whale hears is singing.
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