Authors: Daniel Diehl
With this in mind, we have chosen the earliest possible date for the version of the Sawney Beane tale that follows. Not only does this roughly correspond with the time period of Holinshed and Lindsay’s accounts, both of which more or less agree with the only hard date given in any version of the legends, that being Bean’s supposed execution in 1435, but it is also likely that if the incident had taken place at the end of the sixteenth century the miscreants would have had a much harder time escaping detection and their deeds would almost certainly appear in the historical record. With these limitations in mind, here is the tale of Sawney Beane as we have pieced it together.
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Sawney Beane was born in the county of East Lothian, 8 or 9 miles east of the city of Edinburgh, sometime between 1385 and 1390. He was christened Alexander, after his father, but like many of his countrymen he was gifted with a hefty thatch of red hair and people soon began referring to him simply as Sawney – the old Scots term for Sandy.
Although Alexander senior was a hard-working peasant who eked out a living as a hedge layer and ditch digger, from his earliest years Sawney exhibited a wild unruliness. At his best, the boy was bone idle; at his worst he bordered on dangerously violent. Eventually, Sawney took up with a girl who had a disposition very similar to his own, and together they were far worse than either of them had been on their own. Their
brawling, stealing and half-savage ways ensured that they were constantly in trouble with both their neighbours and the law. In exasperation, Sawney’s parents turned him out when he reached his late teens, assuming that he was old enough, and tough enough, to fend for himself. In no time, the other villagers followed suit and drove Beane and his girlfriend out of town, threatening dire consequences if they ever returned.
Now on the run, and possibly declared outlaws by the king’s local agent, they robbed their way across the country, always only days, or hours, ahead of the forces of justice. Eventually they came to Galloway (now in south Ayrshire) on the south-west coast. It seemed an ideal place for them. Lonely and desolate, the landscape lent itself to furtive movements and provided dozens of hiding places where the law could never find them. Here, among the windswept dunes and rugged coastline, they decided to make their home, hiding by day and venturing out in the evening and early morning to prey on whatever unsuspecting travellers they could find wandering along the lonely tracks and roads that connected the isolated villages along the coast. Galloway was just the kind of place where people could disappear without anyone taking much notice.
Eventually, the Beanes discovered a cave located about half-way between the tiny villages of Lindalfoot and Ballantree near an outcrop of land known as Bennane Head. Situated at the foot of a steep cliff, the cave wound for nearly a mile inside Bennane Head, leading off into one dark, dead end after another and peppered with numerous rooms where they could make a home that was equally safe from prying eyes and the long arm of the law. Best of all, when the tide came in, the crashing surf surged into the mouth of the cave for nearly two hundred yards. No one would ever suspect that members of the human race could survive in such a place.
Their new home may have been safe and sound, but being confined to one spot presented certain problems to their livelihood as thieves. They might become known in the locality. To avoid being recognised and followed back to their lair, they could simply kill all their victims, but this still left them with the problem of disposal – not of their victims, but of the spoils. They could not take the money, weapons and valuables they stole to any nearby town to sell or trade for food and goods. This was a very small and isolated world. Not only were all strangers suspect, but someone would inevitably recognise the plunder as belonging to a friend or relative who had disappeared. But if the Beanes never went into a town or village, how would they get food? They could always steal cattle; cattle rustling was one of the most common occupations for Scottish outlaws, but it was also impossibly dangerous. A captured cattle thief was guaranteed to die on the end of a rope and this did not appeal to Sawney in the least.
The Beanes may have been morally deficient, and possibly even mentally under par, but they were not lacking in a degree of animal cunning and soon the solution to their problems became clear. They would no longer waylay and murder people for their possessions; they would simply use their victims as a source of food and thereby eliminate the need to dispose of their valuables. The first few dismemberings may have been a little distasteful even to Sawney Beane; but after a while it became routine.
Assuming that an average adult human being would render up about 60lb of edible meat, the Beanes could survive on a single kill for a month or more. But the speed at which flesh rots presented another problem. This time it was Mrs Beane who stepped in. To prove she was a good and thrifty homemaker she began to salt down the body parts with salt from the tidal basin, like any other meat being put up for the winter. Eventually, some parts were soaked in ocean brine and other tasty morsels hung
over the fire to be smoked like a fine bacon or ham. Now, when Sawney had a particularly good day and brought home more than one victim, nothing would go to waste. And if pickings got slim out on the highway, there would always be enough food in the larder to see them through the lean times.
With life in the cave safe and secure, and assured of a plentiful supply of food, Sawney and his partner-in-crime settled down to produce a new crop of Beanes. And produce they did. Over the years – while busying himself with depopulating the countryside – Sawney and his mate propagated no fewer than fourteen children. In the fullness of time, these provided them with a collection of eighteen grandsons and fourteen granddaughters, presumably through conjugal combinations best left uncontemplated.
As the children grew up they naturally came to accept that anyone outside their own barbarous clan was to be considered as nothing more than a legitimate food source. What little education they received would have centred on the skills of the hunter-killer and, when they were old enough, they joined their dad in bringing home enough victims to supply the expanding number of mouths lurking inside the cave.
Undoubtedly, the populace around Lindalfoot and Ballantree were now wary enough of the lonely stretches of road between their towns that fewer and fewer travellers dared travel alone. This meant that the Beanes had to range farther and farther afield on their hunting expeditions and lugging home the kills required the help of the younger and stronger members of the clan. To make the most of their forays across Galloway the tribe began organising its attacks with military precision. Guards were concealed on hillocks and behind dunes to alert other members of the clan when likely prospects were coming their way, or when there were signs of trouble lurking over the next rise.
There were also rules of engagement. So long as there were enough Beanes in the hunting party, they could attack groups of
travellers as large as four or five if they were on foot, but never more than two if they were on horseback. When the unwary passer-by came within range, the ferocious, feral Beanes would rush out of hiding, swarm over their victim, slit their throat and drag the carcass back to the cave, leaving little or no evidence of their passing.
It would seem likely that, over the years, someone would have seen this half-naked tribe scurrying across the landscape and assume these were the creatures responsible for the disappearance of so many innocent people. Undoubtedly this did happen. The only reason they did not report their findings is because they, too, became victims of the Beanes. For more than two decades Sawney Beane and his clan carried out their lonely, vicious guerrilla war against the people of the Galloway coast undetected and unsuspected.
Inevitably, as long as the Beanes remained at large, the populace lived in mortal terror. Fewer and fewer people travelled the roads, businesses that relied on outside trade began to collapse and people moved away. Each time a person failed to return home their grieving family reported their disappearance to the local authorities, who duly reported it to the King’s Magistrates and from time to time soldiers came looking for the miscreants who were terrorising the area around Ballantree Bay. Sometimes they made an arrest. Strangers who still dared to come to the area were frequently arrested and taken in for questioning. If they failed to present a legitimate reason for their presence in the area, they were hanged, but still the disappearances continued. The occasional lynching by a fearful and paranoid mob brought no better results. Eventually, in utter frustration, the magistrates decided that the perpetrator had to be someone who lived in the area. The most likely suspects would seem to be the landlords of inns, who might follow any of their overnight guests on their travels, waylay them and dispose of the bodies. Consequently, a few of the more
disreputable innkeepers in the area were taken into custody, questioned and executed, but it did nothing to quell the rash of missing travellers.
With so many mouths to feed, the Beanes’ biggest problem now became not how to procure food, but how to dispose of the waste. The bones were piling up and threatened to fill the cave. To solve the problem the Beanes began to make bone disposal forays under cover of darkness, tossing the remains into the receding waves to be carried out to sea. Naturally, some of the body parts washed back on to shore when the tide returned. It did not take long for local people to realise they were dealing with far more than murder and robbery. The embedded smell of brine combined with the obvious marks of knives and teeth led to the inescapable conclusion that a tribe of cannibals had been operating along the coast for years.
The Beanes’ first – and apparently only – mistake came one day in the spring or summer of 1435 when they waylaid a young couple returning along the coast road from a village fair some distance away. The man and his wife were sharing a horse, probably the only one they owned. The man rode in front, his wife behind, her arms around his waist. As they passed the point where the Beanes lay in wait, the clan jumped out, whooping and screaming, and dragged the woman from the horse before her shocked husband could react.
As she fell to the ground struggling, some of the clan members slit her throat, lapping at the blood as it gushed from her jugular vein, while others slit open her belly, pulling out her entrails as though they were field-dressing a dead animal. While the poor woman lay on the road, thrashing out her life, the stronger members of the Beane clan tried to pull the man from his horse. In terror, he jerked back on the reins, using the horse’s hooves as weapons, scattering the Beanes and wounding some of them horribly in the process. In the confusion the man managed to draw his sword, slashing to the left and right,
driving back his attackers. Eventually, the man would have succumbed or escaped but, as it happened, while the struggle still raged, another group of fair-goers – more than twenty in number – came along the road, causing the Beanes to scurry in all directions.
Shaken and terrified, the man babbled out his incredible tale, taking his rescuers to the spot near the edge of the road where the horribly torn remains of his wife lay in a pool of blood. Having no doubt that they had witnessed an encounter with the Galloway cannibals, the group escorted the sobbing man to Glasgow where he repeated his story to the local magistrates, his companions attesting to the truth of his statements.
The incredulous Chief Magistrate immediately sent a courier to the king at Edinburgh who, in turn, assembled a guard of 400 soldiers and set out for Glasgow. Four days later, King James I and his men arrived to hear the tale of murder and mayhem repeated yet again and asked the man to lead them to the spot of the attack.
For days on end the king, his soldiers and a pack of tracker dogs scoured the roads and lanes between Lindalfoot and Ballantree and all through the surrounding area, but to no avail. Finally, as they were tramping up and down the beach running along the base of Bennane Head cliff, some of the dogs made a dash for a narrow opening in the rock face and set up an unholy, howling racket. Seeing how narrow the opening was, and how far the water ran into the cave, the guards tried to drag the dogs back to the beach, but they refused to budge.
Finally, King James called for torches and ordered some of the men to investigate the entrance of the cave – at least as far as they could. Through the twists and turns of the cavern the men wandered, peering into one dark hole after another until they came upon a stench-filled room piled high with human bones. Some of the remains were obviously old, but others were fresh enough for bits of flesh still to be clinging to them. Sending a
runner back to the mouth of the cave, as many of the party as could scrambled inside, swords and halberds at the ready.
Room after room now yielded up their terrible secrets. In some were piles of half-rotted clothes, in others were stacks of swords, purses of money and other trinkets while in still others were human arms, legs and trunks hung from the ceilings and pickling in casks. It looked like a butcher’s warehouse.
Once the horrified men composed themselves, they made their way deeper and deeper into the dank darkness until they encountered the Beane clan – shrieking and growling like trapped animals. The struggle was short and brutal, but the king’s men eventually dragged twenty-seven savage men and twenty-one women out of the cave where they were securely chained for their return to Edinburgh.
While the prisoners were held under heavy guard, the soldiers removed the bones and body parts, burying them in a pit above the tide line where they were given as near to a Christian burial as was possible under the circumstances. Finally, with the small treasures culled from the piles of debris in the cave securely crated up, the party began working its way back to the capital.
The news of what had happened spread before them, and all along the way crowds of people, some fiercely angry, others gawping with curiosity, gathered to stare in wonder at the Galloway cannibals as they were hauled to justice.