Get your teeth into macabre Scots tale

Otago Daily Times

3 days ago

Once upon a time, a long long time ago, there was a fearsome cannibal clan who lived in a damp coastal cave in Ayrshire.
Or maybe there wasn't. But I'll tell you the story anyway.
Alexander "Sawney" Bean was the head of a cannibalistic family that inhabited a deep-sea cave on the South Ayrshire coast of Scotland.
According to legend, every night Sawney, his wife and their myriad offspring would leap upon unsuspecting travellers on the nearby highway, dragging these poor hapless souls back to the caves, where they were torn limb from limb and devoured. What wasn't consumed on the spot was pickled. As the legend goes, over 1000 people were murdered and eaten by Sawney's clan over a period of 25 years.
I must confess I was rather delighted when I stumbled upon the myth of Sawney Bean. My mother's maiden name, you see, is McBain, of the Clan McBain from Tomatin in Inverness-shire. According to some rather dubious-looking genealogy websites, the McBain surname may be traced back to Aberdeen, with a "Bean" who was a magistrate circa 1210.
Sod illustrious ancestors (a great-great-many-greats-uncle was Admiral of the White in the Royal British Navy, and my grandfather's cousin was Chief Chief to the Queen), I was tickled to find that there was a crumb of a chance I was related to real, actual, cannibals.
Considering all the rough-and-tumble, hair-pulling and biting my siblings and I engaged in, I wasn't surprised. Of course, the likelihood that Sawney Bean actually existed, let alone was related to me, is negligible, if not non-existent. But there's something delightfully fun about imagining what one's (dubious) ancestors might have done.
The story of Sawney Bean and his ravenous family first appeared in The Newgate Calendar , a rather lurid crime catalogue of the 18th and 19th centuries loosely connected with Newgate Prison in London. According to this sensationalist paper, Alexander Bean was born in East Lothian during the 16th century. Bean tried to follow in the footsteps of his father, who was a ditch-digger
and hedge-trimmer, but swiftly realised he was not cut out for that line of work.
Instead, Bean took up with an alleged witch called "Black" Agnes Douglas, and the pair embarked on their chosen trade of robbing and cannibalising people. They soon found the perfect piece of real estate: a coastal cave in Bennane Head between Girvan and Ballantrae, some 180m deep, with an entrance blocked by water during high tide, enabling the couple to live there undiscovered.
Bean and Douglas got busy; they produced six daughters, eight sons, 14 granddaughters, and 18 grandsons (the grandchildren allegedly the products of incest between their children). Surely the local authorities must have been confused and horrified by the sheer number of people going missing in the area?
Despite widespread efforts to scour the surrounding countryside in hopes of finding the vanished individuals or those responsible for their disappearance, no-one ever considered venturing into the dark recesses of Bennane Cave.
Their crimes only came to light when the Bean clan botched an ambush on a married couple riding home from a local fair. The man was armed with a sword and pistol and as such was able to hold the clan off. His wife was not so lucky however; she fell off their horse, was promptly collected by the Beans and stripped and disemboweled on the spot.
Thankfully for the man, a group of around 20 fairgoers came upon the chaos. A fierce skirmish broke out and for the first time, the Bean clan was outnumbered. Overwhelmed, they abandoned the attack and fled back to their coastal lair to regroup. The grief-stricken husband escaped to the local magistrate and recounted his upsetting tale to all who might listen.
It wasn't long before an official posse of 400 men and several bloodhounds, led by King James himself, set off to investigate. The dogs sniffed out the Beans in their cave, and by torchlight, the searchers made a gruesome discovery — the numerous Beans surrounded by the grisly remainders of their meals, body parts strung up on the walls, barrels full of pickled limbs and masses of clothes and jewellery.
Here, the story diverges into two versions of events. The first claims that the clan was captured alive and docilely transferred to the Tolbooth jail in Edinburgh, then moved to Leith, where they were promptly executed, being deemed as subhuman and therefore unfit for trial.
According to the other version, the search party detonated gunpowder at the entrance of their cave, leaving the Bean clan to suffocate.
In truth, there is very little to suggest Sawney Bean and his cannibalistic clan actually existed. Given the alleged widespread panic, one might expect to find some trace of this public alarm in contemporary family records, letters or personal memoirs. But none exist.
It's likely that the story is fictional or exaggerated folklore, possibly borrowed from older European legends and amplified over the years. Dorothy L. Sayers, for example, penned a lurid account of the tale in Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror (1928), which became a best-seller in Britain.
Tales of fearsome Scottish cannibals date back to the early 15th century, with the story of Christie Creek, who lived during a famine in the mid-14th century.
It may be that the legend of Sawney Bean served as political propaganda to denigrate the Scots after the Jacobite rebellions. Bean and his family represented everything that the English feared about the "uncivilised north" — the barbarity of the Highlands, their lawlessness, violence and remoteness. Cannibalism is, after all, the ultimate taboo.
Perhaps the legend was nothing more than a convenient morality tale used to justify English superiority and political control. In an interview with the BBC, Scottish historian Dr Louise Yeoman argued that the legend of Sawney Bean conveyed a "sinister subtext — the books it sold were published not in Scotland but in England, at a time when there was widespread prejudice against Scots".
Whatever the reasons for the legend's genesis, you can't deny it's a fearsome tale, inspiring countless horror stories, novels and movies, such as Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes (1977) and Jack Ketchum's novel Off Season . The tale of the Bean clan has persisted and evolved over the years, slotting nicely into Scottish gothic tourism alongside Burke and Hare, the haunted vaults of Edinburgh and the "Canongate Cannibal".
What of the cave itself? I'd love to tell you I've been there, but sadly I have not. According to people who have been there however, the cave is indeed a couple of hundred metres deep, pitch black and rather chilly.
Graffiti and pigeon droppings have replaced the carcasses and bones, but it still doesn't sound like a pleasant place — hardly a great spot for a seaside picnic.
Whether Sawney Bean and his clan actually existed or not, the legend will persist as a reminder of what happens when a person turns his back on civilisation and retreats into the darkest, dampest, cruellest part of his very being.
The cannibalistic bogeyman will continue to terrify and enthrall generations to come as a monster that embodies humanity's worst fears about themselves. Delicious.
— Jean Balchin is an ODT columnist who has started a new life in Edinburgh.