Time Team
The Story of the Three Sisters' Curse
"If evyr maydenis malysone
Dyd licht upon drye lande,
Let nocht bee funde in Furvye's glebys,
Bot thystl, bente, and sande."
The land was rich and so were we. When Forvie stood proud as a parish in its own right, our family owned everything within it.
My sisters and I had a good life. Unlike the peasant farmers and their children, we were educated, we learned to read and write and wore beautiful clothes made of wool from Aberdeen.
Throughout the parish there was food to eat, and even crops to sell, but the peasants were never satisfied. Our father was a generous landlord. He let every man who cared to work the land make a living from it, each feeding a dozen dirty wretches with the fruits from our father's fields.
As the years passed my sisters and I grew older and had need for more elegant living. We had heard talk of how life in the towns and cities was progressing and determined that we should have a share in this more modern way of life.
No more would we dress and go about like country folk, we deserved better and our father would surely agree. Years ago when we three were just children our mother had died giving birth to our only brother, who sadly survived only a matter of days.
With a dead wife and no son, my father had only us to care for and had doted on us as a result. With his kindness came increasing demands from his daughters, yet he never once refused us. Even when he took to his bed with fever, he worried first and foremost that we were cared for. It was then that we seized our opportunity to regain much of the riches due to us.
Together we turned family after family off our land, claiming we did it all in our father's name. When his doctor told him of what was happening in the parish our kind and gentle father rose from his sick bed and in a fury summoned my sisters and I to his room.
As soon as we saw him standing in a fevered rage we knew we had lost the father we had known, yet it wasn't until the doctor returned that our father told us with that man as a witness that we were no longer his daughters.
Within three days our father had died, yet we refused to leave the house, claiming the doctor lied about our disinheritance. The local people, as we should have expected, took the part of the doctor, and one stormy winter's night a mob arrived and roughly marched us in our night clothes to the shore.
There they cast us adrift in a battered, leaky old boat into the dark night and out to sea. Knowing we were doomed, my sisters and I huddled together and drew up a fierce curse against everyone there on the shore and throughout the parish.
The power of three vindictive women scorned is a force to be reckoned with, and that was a night Forvie would never forget. As we cried our curse, the sand from the seabed rose as high as a city wall and crashed down on the entire parish smothering everything in its wake, leaving nothing but 'thystl, bente and sande'.