A COCKENZIE-BASED heritage group has released a book revealing the tragic accidents and gruesome deaths of past times in the county.

The Quietus Account of Tranent Parish: Strange Tales of Old East Lothian is on sale now from the 1722 Waggonway Heritage Group – based at Cockenzie Harbour – sharing weird, wonderful and dire events in the area.

The group’s Waggonway Project was set up to preserve and promote the route and associated industries of Scotland’s first railway, the 1722 Tranent-Cockenzie Waggonway.

Ed Bethune, project chairman and co-writer of the book, said: “During our research into the Waggonway and associated industries, we came across all these other stories which were fascinating in their own right.”

The stories – sourced from material quoted in newspaper accounts dating as far back as 1731 – include the 1786 ‘Tyger Chace’ of Tranent, which saw a Bengal tiger purchased by a wealthy local released to be hunted for pleasure across the industrial landscape of the Tranent moors; and ‘a body at the boatshore’, about the remains of a murder dug up in a Cockenzie house.

Ed, co-writer Gary Donaldson and illustrator Alan Braby gathered the stories into a book, adding comments.

Ed said: “There’s a fantastic resource online, the British Newspaper Archive, and they’ve got newspapers from as far back as 1700.

“The way the stories were written, and the newspapers back then, there’s an element of sensationalism. They obviously thought they were good stories that people wanted to hear – although most of them do involve some sort of death or misfortune.”

On the book title, Ed said: “‘Quietus’ means death, essentially. It’s an old word for the concept of death.

“We were trying to think of a suitable name for the book and I came across this word being used a fair bit in some of the old sources and it fitted quite well with the content.

“The key thing that came across with a lot of these old newspaper stories was that people really came a cropper in days gone by, in ways that just don’t happen now.

“The bit that really gripped me was that people were always coming into real misfortune. We live in such a safe society these days – pandemics aside.”

The book is available from 1722waggonway.co.uk/product-page/the-quietus-account-of-tranent-parish

All proceeds go to heritage projects in East Lothian.