Oldhamstocks is a small village ten or so miles south of Dunbar in East Lothian (though parts of it were once in Berwickshire as was.

The Memorial is in Oldhamstocks churchyard. The dedication reads, “To the glory of God and in memory of (names) who made the supreme sacrifice in the Great War 1914-1919.”

Side view. Oldhamstocks Kirk in background:-

As its name suggests the village of Cove in Berwickshire – just over the A1 from Cockburnspath where my friend Eric Brown lives – is near to a cove.

This cove:-

The path down to the actual cove goes past this memorial which commemorates the women and children left by the fishing disaster of 14th October 1881 when 189 fishermen were lost off this coast. Cove lost 11 out of 21 fishermen.

The path goes through a tunnel cut through this bluff; the cove itself is therefore very secluded:-

On the harbour wall there are bollards for boats to tie up to. They show interesting accretions of rust:-

Gordon is in the part of the Borders region that was once called Berwickshire.

The memorial is unmissable as you come through the village from north to south.

It’s in the form of a Scottish wayside cross with Celtic ornamentation, and has apparently been moved from its original position in the public park to the crossroads at the centre of town.

It appears to bear only First World War names.* According to the Scottish War Memorials website there are Second World War dead for Gordon but the poster doesn’t say where they can be found.

*One of the names is for a soldier who ws killed in action in 1920. George Stuart Henderson had an unusually high number of decorations; VC, DSO and Bar, MC, and Mentioned in Despatches no less than 5 times. He died in the Arab revolt in what was then called Mesopotamia, now Iraq. Some things never seem to change.

We’ve been on our trips away again. We were based in Yorkshire for the most part but on the way down we went via Coldstream in the Borders, Berwickshire as was. It’s just over the River Tweed from England and is the “home” of the Coldstream Guards and also has ex-Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Home‘s ancestral pile of The Hirsel (not open to the public) nearby.

The photos were taken with our new camera with which I’ve not yet fully come to grips.

Coldstream isn’t very big, but big enough to have a War Memorial. Very Cenotaph-like. Great War top plaque, Second World War below.

Up a side street there was a deconsecrated church which has at some time been converted to a Bar & Function Room. Perhaps it was in the 1930s for the entrance is deco!

Not a very catchy headline, is it?

Yet this is exactly what has happened at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan – an event which has now apparently overshadowed the many thousands of deaths from the tsunami which followed the earthquake; a tragedy of enormous scale, very difficult to get your head round, and virtually unbloggable.

Yes, it was stupid to site the plant by the sea-shore in a quake-prone region subject to tsunami inundation. Yes, there should have been thought put to the likelihood of a tsunami stopping the cooling system’s pumps from working. Yes, there should have been back-up cooling systems in place.

But…

No-one has died yet.

Of course any unnecesssary deaths are to be deplored but any deaths will be microscopic in number compared to the natural disaster.

And there are deaths associated with the extraction of coal and oil/gas for burning to make electricity. Even hydro-electricity has its drawbacks.

There are catches to alternative power generation methods too.

No power generation technology will be free of them.

It’s a question of risk, and nuclear generation has quite small ones really. (The waste is a different issue.)

I wouldn’t want a nuclear power plant in my backyard, though.

What’s that? Torness is only a relatively few miles away (as the wind blows) on the Berwickshire coast?

Hmm. So it is.

But then I grew up between Glasgow and Faslane; two prime targets in the event of the Cold War becoming hot, with a third – Holy Loch – not much further away, and barely gave it a thought.

Mind you, thermonuclear immolation would be a damn sight quicker than radiation poisoning.