Bram Stoker's Cruden Bay

BRAM STOKER’S FIRST CRUDEN BAY NOVEL – THE WATTER’S MOU’

Bram Stoker wrote two novels based in Cruden Bay. The first of these was The Watter’s Mou’ which was published in 1895, two years before Dracula came out in 1897.

The plot concerns a conflict of duty between the local coastguard Sailor Willie and his lover Maggie McWhirter, the daughter of a fisherman in the village. Maggie’s father is involved in smuggling and her lover has a duty as a coastguard to stop it. Sailor Willie is invited to a wedding held at the grain store essentially to get him out of the way while the smuggled goods are brought into Port Erroll harbour. He rumbles this scheme and returns to his coastguard hut to keep watch. Maggie meets him nearby and pleads with him to let this one go, but no he can’t. She then takes a great risk sailing out during a rising storm from the Watter’s Mou, a coastal inlet near Slains Castle (see the photo above). She intercepts the boat and warns her father that the smuggling run has been discovered. On returning to the Watter’s Mou’ the boat is wrecked and Maggie drowns. Sailor Willie discovers her body and he too is drowned while attempting to recover it.

What’s curious about the novel is that it’s mostly written in the local Aberdeenshire dialect, commonly known as the Doric dialect. It can be difficult for outsiders to understand the Doric due to its numerous dialect words and the vowels are often shifted in normal English words, none becomes nane for instance. The wh syllable at the start of a word is replaced with f. For instance, the word who becomes fa in Doric.

Another curiosity is that Bram Stoker uses real places and real people in the novel. So I'll show some photographs of the places he mentions.