Strange story behind mysterious bundle on Keiss beach
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A rusty brown bundle of rubbery sheets has washed up on the shoreline of Keiss beach and harbours a tale of shipwrecks and environmental disaster.
Each sheet in the block appears to have a webbed pattern that is very similar to a bale discovered at Dunnet beach in 2019 that has since disappeared and which featured in a news article at that time.
A beachcomber and conservationist based in Cornwall, Steve Trewhella, looked at images of the Dunnet find and said it was probably 'gutta-percha', a dense form of latex similar to rubber and used extensively in the late 19th and early 20th centuries for a myriad of domestic and industrial purposes.
“Your photos show they’re the same as the bales we find down here,” said Steve back in March 2019.
“People sometimes think they’re bales of drugs or there are chemicals wrapped up inside them but they’re just sheets of this gutta-percha that have probably come to the surface from a shipwreck.”
The bale on Keiss beach shows evidence that it has been in a rusty ship's hold for some time and has the distinctive pattern on its surface that is associated with vintage gutta-percha production.
He went on to state that it was quite possible that the gutta-percha bundle could even have come from the historic ocean liner RMS Titanic. “It was hugely popular around a century ago and there is evidence from the existing logs that the Titanic was carrying gutta-percha when she sank in 1912.
“It’s not beyond the realms of possibility that the bales could have come from that ship. We get a lot of debris floating over to the UK from the Newfoundland coast which pass over the wreck site.”
Local historian Andrew Gutteridge, who lives in Dunnet, said that in a stretch of the north Scottish coastline, from Fraserburgh to the Fair Isle Channel, there are "well over 1500 shipwrecks" recorded, going back over 200 years.
He added: "For cargo vessels the cargoes are only patchily recorded. Gutta-percha was a commonly used material for a long time, and widely transported from the early 19th century, so any number of these sunken cargo vessels could have been carrying it as part of their cargo, and therefore possibly be the source of these bundles."
Gutta-percha latex comes from the sap of a tropical tree of the same name and one of its uses was as an insulator for underwater telegraph cables – the remains of one can still be seen on Reiss Beach.
Before modern plastic began to be widely used, gutta-percha was also made into such items as golf balls, teddy bear noses, picture frames and jewellery. The situation almost turned into an ecological disaster with gutta-percha being harvested to the point that the trees were almost completely wiped out mainly to provide insulation for the transatlantic cable telegraph system.
The core of the Reiss Beach cable, if carefully analysed, is surrounded by gutta-percha and with a length of 122 nautical miles it needed tons of latex to cover the distance to Shetland. However, with the advent of new materials such as Bakelite in the early 20th century and then with other plastics being produced its use waned and the tree numbers rose again.
Conservationists such as Steve Trewhella have been finding gutta-percha bales and solid ingots of the substance stamped with the name of the Indonesian plantations they originated from. “If you were to rip open that bale you photographed I’m pretty sure you’ll find the name of the plantation it came from stamped on the sheets,” he said.
Steve stressed that though gutta-percha is a natural substance and biodegradable “it was worrying from an ecological standpoint” that the material still washes up in a relatively good condition.
“Considering these bales are at least 100 years old and when you see the relatively good condition they’re in, it doesn’t bode well for all the plastic that currently pollutes our seas.”
Steve has written a book with his wife Julie Hatcher called The Essential Guide to Beachcombing which is available on Amazon.
Gutta-percha is now mainly used in dentistry for root canal treatment and the trees that produce it are no longer endangered.
