Unnerving and unseasonal tale that became oft-told 18th century legend

Roamer is enduring the second week of a fearsome winter cold - a blocked nose, headache, sore throat and a bad cough - the whole works.

It absolutely refuses to subside.

Most folk are enjoying the traditional build-up to Christmas but I’m not feeling at all festive; thus, a story today that’s completely unseasonal!

I hope you’ll forgive me and blame my germs.

Several months ago, on the road from Cairnryan to Troon, I was told the unnerving tale of a legendary Scottish cannibal.

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I’ve often driven past Bennane Head, about eight miles south of Girvan and several miles north of Ballantrae, but I’d never heard about Sawney Bean and his fearsome, man-eating family who lived there in a deep cave at the base of a 150-foot cliff.

During the 18th century this monster was much talked and written about, and together with his family, Sawney Bean became the ‘star’ one of Scotland’s most shocking and gruesome legends.

Sawney Bean was born in East Lothian during the 1500s.

His father dug ditches and cut hedges for a living, a family trade that young Sawney found far too energetic.

So he ran away from home with a girl-friend who also disliked hard work.

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Together they ‘moved into’ a cave near Ballantrae on the Ayrshire coast and lived there rent-free with little or no maintenance costs.

The cave was some 200 yards long and during high tide the entrance was blocked by water.

It has been visited by local historians and archaeologists who’ve found nothing to substantiate the horror story, yet it’s deeply engrained in folklore and legend.

At the beginning of their sojourn by the sea the Beans fed themselves by living off the land, eating berries and mushrooms, trapping birds and animals, and occasionally catching a fish or collecting shells on the shore. But this was all too much like hard work.

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So Sawney and his wife sustained themselves by robbing and then murdering anyone unlucky enough to come too close to their coastal abode.

Then they began eating their victims.

The gory legends, and there are many, include extremely unpleasant details of pickled body parts, and corpses piled high, deep in the cave.

The years passed and the Bean family grew - they raised 14 children and 32 grandchildren - most, if not all, from incest.

They needed more food so they continued in their barbarous practices, hunting in a pack to ensure that their quarry could not escape.

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One estimate taken from early, printed story-sheets about the cannibal clan puts the amount that the family killed at around 1,000 souls.

Most historians say the legend was contrived to sell books, published not in Scotland but in England at a time when there was widespread prejudice against Scots.

At the time of the Jacobite risings in the 18th Century, the English press regularly portrayed the Scots in a negative way, either as subjects of ridicule or as having a sinister nature.

Apparently the name ‘Sawney’ was then a popular English name for the caricatured, barbarous Scot. The earliest dated versions of the story, printed in illustrated tracts, date from the 1770s, but some sources place Sawney Bean in the reign of James I of Scotland in the early 1400s.

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Whatever the alleged date, the coastal population of Ayrshire eventually set about hunting down the Beans. One day a man and his wife were riding home together from a fair, or so the story goes.

They were attacked by Sawney and his bloodthirsty family, and just as the man’s wife was being murdered, a group of 30 local folk arrived and the Beans all ran away.

A message was sent to Glasgow, from whence a hefty search party, with sniffer dogs, was dispatched.

When they discovered the cave and went inside, the dogs whined and barked alarmingly in the darkness.

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The search party followed the dogs inside, their torches flickering in the half-light.

They followed the twists and turns of the cave, descending deeper and deeper underground until at last they arrived at the lair of Sawney Bean.

All around them, on rocks, on walls, laid out in piles and hanging from the ceiling, were human limbs and arms, and thighs and feet.

The body parts of hundreds of people hung up in rows, as if in a gruesome, horrendous, slaughter-house.

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The family was arrested and taken to the Tolbooth in Edinburgh where, without an investigation or trial - so horrendous was the evidence - all the Beans were executed.

The legends recount the male members of the family having their limbs cut off so that they bled to death.

The women were supposedly treated with a little more respect - they were burned to death!

A number of attempts to verify the Sawney Bean story have proved unsuccessful and have led to the conclusion that it is pure fabrication. Curiously, one of the caves between Girvan and Ballantrae was still inhabited until the 1970s.

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The last resident nicknamed ‘Snib Scott’ was a vagrant with a long grey beard, and was often referred to as Sawney Bean.

The infamous tale of Sawney Bean has, over the years, inspired novels, plays, operas, and at least one major Hollywood movie - The Hills Have Eyes.

Its writer and director Wes Craven said he used the story of Sawney Bean as a primary source for his script.