Slains Castle, just north of Cruden Bay is known as being the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s legendary tale of Dracula. It’s now ruined but still imposing remains sit right on the edge of sheer cliffs that plunge down for about a hundred feet to the rock foot and the sea. Several people have lost their lives on these cliffs – they are extremely dangerous.
Some of the more experienced club divers knew that there was a wreck smashed up hard in at the rocks right below the castle’s remains. I was told that there was a rather perilous way down the cliffs to the rocks below, from the grassy area beside the castle where visitors park.
So, for our next club dive we agreed to meet at the car park as ever at 10am on a Sunday. I arrived at the dive site and parked my car alongside the others, who had arrived before me. I asked how we were to get down to the sea and someone beckoned me towards the sheer cliffs. I strolled over and had a look down. Far below the sea surged and washed over a number of rocky spurs and ledges before draining away to reveal, wet, seaweed covered rocks plunging down into the sea.
The main cliffs, down which we were apparently going to climb, looked seriously steep and I could see no obvious way down. Nevertheless I got kitted up into wet suit, ABLJ, weights and slung my air tank onto my back.
Once we were all ready, clutching fins and torch in one hand we all walked over towards the cliffs. This was going to be interesting.
I followed along behind the group as we meandered over to an almost imperceptible small gully that ran steeply down from the cliff edge. Here, cut in the rock, rather precariously, were roughly hewn steps over the difficult areas.
One by one we started slowly down the solid but undulating rock of the track. I scrambled down the steep path, sometimes leaning so far back to keep my balance that I was holding myself off the rocks with my trailing hand. At other times I was almost sitting on the rock as I went down.
We made our way down the 100-foot cliffs in this ungainly fashion but as we neared the rock foot the track became less steep and I could walk more easily. At the very bottom, the track opened out onto a large tabletop slab of solid rock. Just here, there was a large rectangular hole, some 15 feet across and about 5 feet deep cut into the rocky shelf.
“That’s the old castle pool for keeping lobsters and crabs in – nothing like fresh lobster” piped up one of the old hands.
So that was it – a hundred years or more ago some poor souls had been delegated to cut these solid steps down the precarious cliffs and hack out a pool from the solid rock, just to keep shell fish fresh for the guests at the Castle. Ingenious - and very functional. I tried to imagine the scene – my thoughts in black and white like an old picture. Castle servants in white grandad shirts with black waistcoats and caps bashing away at the solid rock to enlarge and shape what was probably partly an original feature.
We moved past the lobster pool and soon were standing at the side of the rocky shelf. From here there was a straight drop down some four or five feet to the deep water of a gully. The visibility looked quite good - I could see some large rocks under the surface sticking outwards.
Fully kitted, a diver is very heavy. I was going to have to make sure that I picked an entry point where I could leap far enough outwards to clear these rocks. Looking around, I spotted a large rock further along to seaward, which just protruded from the water, right at the bottom of the shelf. This would be my exit point and would allow me to clamber from there out of the water – and from there, back up onto the shelf where I was standing.
My dive buddy and myself were ready. He moved up to the edge of the shelf and had a good look down. Clutching his mask to his face with one hand, his torch in the other, he strode and half-leapt well out from the edge, clearing the submerged rocks and splashing down heavily into the water. The sea seemed to part to swallow him up before closing over him with a large white splash. A second or two later his head popped up again and rolling onto his back he kicked his fins and moved away from my entry point - keeping an eye on me.
Heart beating, I moved up to the edge and put one hand up and held my mask to my face. I looked down once to check where in the water I was aiming to land - and then raised my head to look at the horizon. I had heard of faceplates cracking on stride entries if a diver was staring straight downwards. The glass took the force of the impact with the water and sometimes yielded to it.
Striding outwards strongly and pushing off with my trailing leg I was suddenly air borne. The combined weight of my dive kit and myself took me downwards like a Disney ride and I splashed into an explosion of white water and bubbles.
As the foam of my entry dissipated, I looked downwards and saw the seabed at the bottom of the gully running off out to seaward. I looked back at my buddy and he signalled for us to dive - so down we went to the bottom. I then followed him as we meandered out along the bottom of the gully before we cleared a large rocky shelf and the seabed dropped away deeper.
We followed the seabed down and as we moved on, I started to see some mangled bits of ship debris. Some rotted plates were lying in the sand alongside a pile of anchor chain. As we moved further out, the debris field got thicker and more crowded. Very soon the whole seabed was covered in the remains of a ship’s demise.
The seabed was an almost uniform litter of flattened bits of ship. Sections of ship’s side plating, beams and struts lay all around, sometimes part covered by rippled sandbanks - driven there by winter storms. Then in the distance two large black circles appeared, some five metres high. As we approached them I saw that they were boilers, about seven metres in length. I swam around them trying to work out how they had functioned in life.
All around the two boilers were the remains of an engine room. Large steam pipes competed for space with mangled bits of catwalks and other unidentifiable pieces of machinery. And all around in all the nooks and crannies provided by this mass of bent and buckled steel, the seabed teemed with all manner of crabs, lobsters and the occasional conger eel.
I was also surprised to find several golf balls in varying states of decay amongst the debris. Cruden Bay, a small coastal village a few miles down the coast, has a very fine and well-respected championship golf course, which I had played, right down at the seaside. These golf balls had been lost aeons ago and had been driven here along the sandy seabed by the current before becoming trapped in the wreckage.
Once our time on the bottom was almost up, we retraced our steps back through the mangled mess of steel. I was very impressed at my dive buddy’s precision in difficult surroundings in being able to navigate straight back to the same gully where we had entered.
Once back ashore we had to struggle up the steep path cut in the cliffs to the cars high above us before cracking open flasks of tea and chatting about the wreck. This had been my first taste of wreck diving and although there was no recognisable ship shape left to the vessel, the submerged devastation had been fascinating. I tried to envisage the awesome power of winter easterly storms that could pulverise and reduce a large ship to pieces no larger than a dining room table. No one knew the name of the vessel.
Once back home, in the coming week’s I read up on a few publications about shipwrecks in the north of Scotland. In an old dive magazine I came across an article on shipwrecks around these shores. Interestingly, there was brief mention of the SS Chicago, which had run aground right beneath Slains Castle in 1894. She was a large vessel and the more I read the more I realised that this was surely the identity for this wreck. This was my first taste of amateur wreck detective work and soon I was regaling the club with the identity of the wreck and the story of its sinking.
Just identifying the wreck and learning its story had brought the wreck to life for me. No longer was it a mangled pile of junk on the seabed. I could tell where the vessel had been built and by whom. But the most intriguing aspect of all was the tale of how this vessel came to lie at the foot of Slains Castle.
The SS Chicago had been a Sunderland registered schooner-rigged steamship owned by the Neptune Steam Navigation Company. She had sailed on 9 October 1894 from her homeport