North Berwick: Scotland’s Seaside Mirage Where Gannets, Golf, and Global Anxiety Collide

North Berwick, Scotland – a postcard-perfect seaside town where the gulls scream like unpaid interns and the North Sea breeze delivers exfoliation services free of charge. To the 7,000 locals, it’s simply “the burgh.” To the rest of the planet, it is either a dot on Google Maps or a cautionary tale about what happens when golf, renewable energy, and existential dread share a single post code.

Zoom out and the place becomes a geopolitical punch-line. On the same latitude as Sitka, Alaska, North Berwick manages to be both balmier and more existentially frigid. The town’s two famous sons—King James I (assassinated in 1437, thanks for asking) and Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers (co-founder of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, died broke in Paris)—suggest a civic knack for producing visionaries who meet sticky ends abroad. If that isn’t a metaphor for post-Brexit Britain, I don’t know what is.

The global significance of North Berwick lies, paradoxically, in its refusal to be globally significant. The Bass Rock—an extinct volcanic plug turned guano factory—hosts the world’s largest northern gannet colony. Climate change has gifted these birds ring-side seats to their own habitat loss, a spectacle now streamed in 4K by BBC Earth viewers from Lagos to Los Angeles. Nothing says “Anthropocene” like watching seabirds negotiate avian real estate while the same North Sea that buoys their rookery is being auctioned off for wind-farm leases to the same multinational consortia powering your doom-scroll.

Tourism, of course, is the town’s polite extortion racket. Americans fly in to play the West Links, chasing the ghosts of Old Tom Morris and the even older ghost of their 401(k)s. Japanese honeymooners photograph the pastel beach huts, blissfully unaware that the pastel is largely algae-resistant paint engineered in Shenzhen. Meanwhile, the local economy gently milks them with £5 coffees and gluten-free tablet, a Scottish confection that tastes like diabetes wearing a kilt.

Then there’s the nuclear shadow. Thirty miles down the coast sits Torness Power Station, a concrete carbuncle that keeps the lights on in Edinburgh and the anxiety levels elevated here. In the event of a meltdown, North Berwick’s evacuation plan is essentially “head inland and hope the tweed holds.” The town’s proximity to slow-motion apocalypse rarely features in the brochures, though it does add a certain piquant note to the lobster rolls.

Still, the locals remain stoic, which is Scots for “too polite to riot.” They watch million-pound houses sprout like mushrooms after rain, purchased by remote Londoners who confuse FOMO with heritage. They endure the annual influx of Fringe performers testing “site-specific” theatre on seagulls. And every August they stage the North Berwick Highland Games, where cabers are tossed and knees are shredded in a ritual that looks suspiciously like the last days of Rome, but with better commentary from the BBC.

What does North Berwick tell the wider world? That even at the ragged edge of a small island, globalization finds a way to sell you back your own scenery. That renewable energy and bird excrement can coexist in a delicate capitalist ballet. And that human beings, regardless of passport, will pay premium prices to stand on a chilly beach and contemplate their insignificance—ideally with artisanal ice cream.

So come for the golf, stay for the creeping dread. North Berwick is not the center of the universe, but it is an excellent vantage point from which to watch it unravel, preferably wrapped in cashmere and sipping a peated single malt. Just remember: the seagulls were here first, and they’ve unionized.