by Gary Dolman
On the beautiful South Ayreshire coast of Scotland is the tiny town of Ballantrae, the setting for R.L. Stephenson’s classic novel, The Master of Ballantrae.
This area is steeped in legend and folklore and Ballantrae itself has associations with perhaps the most gruesome of these – the story of Sawney Bean.
Alexander Sawney Bean was – so the story goes – the head of a family of cannibals who orchestrated a 25-year reign of ambush and murder in the 15th Century from a hidden sea cave on this part of the coast.
Bean was born in a small village in East Lothian, close to Edinburgh towards the end of the 14th Century. He found occupation as a hedger and ditcher, but being by nature idle and dishonest, he soon eloped with a woman who was as vicious and unpleasant as he was. The Beans set up home in a remote and hidden cave and supporting themselves by robbing and murdering passing travellers. It wasn’t too long before they began to eat their victim’s flesh too, often pickling or salting it for later consumption.
n time, their family grew into a lawless, incestuous gang of some 46 children and grandchildren with a proportionately increasing demand for food (and therefore victims). It is said that many hundreds, perhaps up to 1,000 persons disappeared from this area during this period. How or why the persons kept disappearing was a mystery locally, since no one survived to tell the tale, and the cave the Beans had chosen kept them well hidden. The tide passed right into the mouth of the cave, which went almost a mile back into the cliffs.
Eventually however, the Bean clan’s luck ran out. A man and his wife returning from a local fair were ambushed by the family. The husband put up a desperate struggle with sword and pistol and managed to fight his way free. His wife however was not so fortunate. She lost her balance, fell from her horse and was instantly dismembered by the cannibals who ripped out her entrails and started to feast on her flesh. Her horrified husband attacked again, soon being joined by other returning fairgoers. Now outnumbered and in danger of being overwhelmed, the Bean family broke off the attack and retreated back to their hide-out.
The husband and the fairgoers made their way directly to Glasgow where they informed the magistrates, who in turn told the King; James IV. A strong militia of some 400 men was duly dispatched and the hunt for the cannibals begun.
Unfortunately for the Beans, the King’s men were equipped with bloodhounds and while the men did not spot the cave, the dogs were soon drawn to the strong smell of flesh. The men entered to find a truly ghastly scene of human bodies hanging from the roof, pickled limbs stacked in barrels, and great piles of money and trinkets taken from the victims. The family were all caught alive and taken to Edinburgh in chains where they were incarcerated in the Tollbooth and the next day taken to nearby Leith.
As a punishment seen as befitting their crimes, an execution was ordered whereby the men were slowly bled to death after having their hands and legs amputated with the women forced to watch, after which they, in turn, were burned alive.
The Victorian chronicler John Nicholson described the execution in his Historical and Traditional Tales Connected with the South of Scotland as follows ‘…they all died without the least sign of repentance, but continued cursing and vending the most dreadful imprecations to the very last gasp of life’.
Fortunately, (or unfortunately according to one’s point of view), the truth of the legend is hard to confirm. There are no contemporary historical accounts that mention Sawney Bean and the story itself first appears in the ‘chapbooks’ of the 18th Century, which were notorious for exaggeration and scandal-mongering. It might be noted however, that in the Scotland of the 15th Century, there were records of great famine and these did include some instances of cannibalism.
Please click here to view Mr. Dolman’s previous posts:
The Cruel Exploitation of Children in the London Slave Market
Vikings Slash and Strangle to Appease the Sea-Gods
Gary Dolman was born in the industrial North East of England in the 1960s but grew up in Yorkshire where he now lives with his wife, three children and dogs. He writes historical crime fiction which explores the very darkest places of the human mind. Mr. Dolman is the author of two novels, The Eighth Circle of Hell and Red Dragon – White Dragon.
