‘The fear has properly set in’: how it feels to watch my home town disappear into the sea

A decade ago, on my friend's birthday, we took a huge tent and stayed the night at our local campsite. We laughed as we put the tent up where the grass met the shingle beach, the sunshine glistening on the water, the sound of the waves scraping the stones. I remember a night of ghost stories, teenage gossip and chasing each other with seaweed.

But the land where we pitched our tent is no longer there. It's somewhere in the North Sea.

My home town, Inverbervie, on the north-east coast of Scotland, is disappearing. The beachfront I played along as a child, where I collected driftwood and chased waves, looks very different now. Standing on the shingle, the coastal path that once led me safely to the shore has been mercilessly carved away by the sea. Buried second world war pillboxes have been exposed and the bridges I paddled under have almost been engulfed by water.

The Inverbervie Community caravan park is at the heart of the community - managed by locals, it is the place where they go for Bonfire Night and summer galas. The manager, Alick Smith, a 73-year-old volunteer, has seen the change first-hand over the past 45 years. He remembers a time, not too long ago, when fishers landed with full nets of salmon and locals paddled freely in the shallow basin where the River Bervie met the sea.

I visited him before and after Storm Gerrit, at the end of December. On my second visit, the paths I had walked a week earlier had disappeared. He told me to make sure I didn't slip on the sea-soaked remnants of the campsite. My boots got tangled in the seaweed scattered on the road. Smith had measured the land lost at the campsite. Thirteen metres had gone in the space of a year, he said - half the pitch.

The campsite started shrinking - dramatically - in November 2022. North-east Scotland saw a month's worth of rain in two days. Whipped by the wind, the flood waters broke the banks of the Bervie. All we could do was watch. We thought it was a one-off, but the storms keep coming.

Babet, Debi, Gerrit, Henk, Isha. These days the storms arrive like angry guests every couple of weeks from October until March. We used to get the occasional reprieve, but not any more. Babet, last October, was when the fear properly set in. No one could remember seeing waves that high. We secured what we could, got out the sandbags and hoped for the best.