Qualla: St Abbs

St Abbs: Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Walter Baxter, CC BY-SA 2.0. Signs around the village declare it twinned with New Asgard. Another set claim a partnership with Eroda, a fictional island that exists only in a Harry Styles music video. Both are jokes that the village leans into, but they say something true about St Abbs: this fishing village on the Berwickshire coast, only a few rows of cottages wrapped around a small harbour, somehow keeps attracting outsized attention. The clear water draws scuba divers from across Britain. The dramatic cliffs drew filmmakers looking for somewhere that could pass for a Norse god's seaside retreat. And one September morning in 1914, the headland overlooking the village watched the German U-21 sink HMS Pathfinder offshore in the first sinking of a warship by a self-propelled torpedo fired from an enemy submarine.

Read more: St Abbs on Qualla

Image: Walter Baxter | CC BY-SA 2.0

St Abbs: From Coldingham Shore to St Abbs

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Walter Baxter, CC BY-SA 2.0. Until the 1890s the place was called Coldingham Shore. The fishermen who worked the small beach below the cliffs lived a mile and a half up the path in the inland village of Coldingham, carrying their nets and creels down to the boats each day on what the locals still call the Cr...

Read more: St Abbs on Qualla

Image: Walter Baxter | CC BY-SA 2.0

St Abbs: The Saint on the Headland

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Emoscopes, CC BY-SA 3.0. The new name came from the high rocky promontory just north of the village. St Abb's Head was itself named after Aebbe of Coldingham, a 7th-century Northumbrian princess who founded a double monastery for monks and nuns nearby and was honoured as a saint after her death. The head...

Read more: St Abbs on Qualla

Image: Emoscopes | CC BY-SA 3.0

St Abbs: Beneath the Surface

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Walter Baxter, CC BY-SA 2.0. The sea around St Abbs is unusually clear. Cold North Sea water meets a coastline largely free of the silt-laden estuaries that cloud the water further north and south, and the result is visibility good enough that Britain's first Voluntary Marine Reserve was established here on ...

Read more: St Abbs on Qualla

Image: Walter Baxter | CC BY-SA 2.0

St Abbs: Lifeboat and Tunnock

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit H4hwn, CC0. The lifeboat station was first established in 1911, after the wreck of the SS Alfred Erlandsen made the case impossible to ignore. For more than a century the RNLI ran it, until the institution withdrew its lifeboat in 2015. The village refused to let the station close. A local f...

Read more: St Abbs on Qualla

Image: H4hwn | CC0

St Abbs: New Asgard

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nachosan, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 2018, Marvel Studios brought film crews to St Abbs to shoot scenes for Avengers: Endgame. In the film, the village stands in for New Asgard, the refuge where the surviving Asgardian refugees, led by Thor, settle on Earth after the destruction of their world. The crew filmed on...

Read more: St Abbs on Qualla

Image: Nachosan | CC BY-SA 3.0