X-Craft Midget Submarines, Aberlady Bay

At low tide, the sands of Aberlady Bay in East Lothian stretch out for near enough a kilometre before they reach the sea, revealing mysterious black shapes sitting at the far extent of the low-tide line.

These skeletons have lain on the tidal flats now for nearing eight decades, exposed and drowned tens of thousands of times by the retreating and advancing sea. At first, they were moored to a huge concrete cube; but presumably any tethering rope had long since rotted away. Remarkably, men once lived and worked inside them. Two, maybe even three, in each. They were known as X-Craft, or midget submarines: tiny vessels designed and built during the Second World War to undertake sabotage missions on any ships docked in enemy harbours.

Conditions inside were, unsurprisingly, extreme – cramped, cold, and damp. Operations could run for as much as two weeks at sea, with food cooked in a tiny glue pot. Each X-Craft had what was called a ‘wet and dry’ compartment – an air lock that would allow a crew member to don a diving suit and open an external hatch so they could work outside the ship, cutting holes in submarine netting, or planting depth charges.

It is, perhaps, a strange legacy that these two training prototypes of the midget submarine – craft that once chased fish and crab along the floor of Loch Erisort – have ended up scuttled here on the sands of Aberlady Bay. There was little sentimentality in how they were treated as the war ended. Towed all the way from the west coast in 1946, they were tied to that heavy concrete block and, for a time, used as targets for RAF fighter planes. Yet still they persist.