Hilary Brown

As you drive east of the City Bypass, leaving endless columns of articulated transports to thunder on down the Al, the coast road to North Berwick opens on to a bleak landscape of black boulders, sluiced by a grey sea – Cockenzie Power Station, like a mindless cosh, bruising this southerly shore of the Firth of Forth. At Aberlady, there is an abrupt change of scene. The road twists through the village and past a green where old men walk their dogs in the early morning. Gullane is two miles further on and you are now in serious golfing country. Undulating hillocks and broad plains, a jigsaw of long grasses and greens shaved smooth, are dotted with figures hauling buggies and squat trees flattened by the winds sweeping off the North Sea.