The COVID-19 lockdown has taught me many things, but one of the most immediate is that apparently everyone seems to know about all the places I thought only I knew about. All the secret little walks that used to be silent and empty – the pathways and parkland, cemeteries and seashores – are now full of people undertaking their daily, state-mandated exercise. Not just a handful of scattered figures in the distance, either. Whole families roar past on foot or bicycles, strung along in a row like toy ducks on an invisible cord.

So I’ve had to wander a bit further than usual, and it’s Seafield – a hinterland of crematoria and car dealerships nestled between Leith and Portobello, all suffused with the acrid odour emanating from the nearby waste water treatment works – where I’ve found a space to myself.

Turn off Seafield Road onto Marine Esplanade, past the sewage plant’s entrance, and you quickly come to the edge of the Firth of Forth: a wide expanse of water with the glittering lights of Kirkcaldy on the other side. There’s a grass walkway here, sandwiched between the treatment works’ chain fence and the sea wall, that leads down to the edge of what then becomes Portobello beach. We’re not going that way, though.

Behind me, the road is lined with a tall mound of earth. It’s a scrabble to climb the dry, dusty surface and then skid down the other side onto a wide stretch of land, empty apart from eerie furrows and piles of rubbish that have collected between them. When it’s sunny, as it is today, the ground is parched and cracked. A few minute’s walk takes us across to the railway tracks, the Edinburgh and Dalkeith Railway, that once shipped coal between Leith’s Imperial Docks and the Cockenzie power station further to the east. Small trees grow up between the sleepers now. No trains come here any more. You can follow the train lines in a long arc back to the level crossing at the junction of Marine Esplanade and Seafield Road. Interesting as it is to watch the multiple sets of tracks coalesce, one by one, into a single line, that leads only to a dead end at the locked gates of the crossing. I cross the tracks and head towards the large, hangar-like buildings in the distance.

From here, the environment takes on an eerie feel. In his landmark work The Weird and The Eerie, Mark Fisher states that “the eerie seldom clings to enclosed and domestic spaces; we find the eerie more readily in landscapes partially emptied of the human”. I feel this no more powerfully than when wandering in spaces like the not-quite-empty industrial wastes of Seafield. The flat landscape, broken only by one tall spoil heap and strewn with scatterings of industrial debris, reminds me of Tarkovsky’s Stalker. Piles of discarded cable spools, unnervingly large, play with my sense of scale for a moment. From a distance they look unpleasantly fungal. Computer parts seem to sprout from the ground. Bramble vines creep out from immense bushes that shiver occasionally as rats skitter around within. At least I hope it’s rats.

A white square of near-pristine concrete shows where a building was intended to be constructed. In the middle sits a single office chair. I skirt around it, as I would around a grave.

This site, perhaps more than any other, holds within it the eerie tension that Fisher explains exists between failures of absence and failures of presence. There are ghosts here. Not ghosts of humans but ghosts of humanity itself. Someone once intended for a building to be here and that intent remains. Fisher says that the eerie can “give us access to spaces beyond mundane reality”, and I can feel, so very faintly, that in some other world a building is here. I shiver despite the sunshine. The lorries rumbling along Seafield Road sound very far away. I would rather spend a night in the nearby cemetery than here, I think to myself.

A seagull flies overhead and its swooping shadow snaps me from my reverie; I recall Fisher highlighting the eerie’s tendency to cause “detachment from the urgencies of the everyday”. I start to head back to that mundane world. Across the train tracks, between the furrows, over the mounded earth and scree.

I look back and wonder if this place will ever be developed like the other reclaimed brownfield sites nearby. Will tall residential complexes, capped with Ballardian two-storey penthouses, grow here as they have in Newhaven? Or maybe squat colony buildings, in tastefully mismatched brown brick, like the ones living up to their name and slowly appropriating the land near Ocean Terminal.

Will buildings come here? Will they know, in some distant way, that their own dead still linger?

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Daniel Pietersen is a writer of weird fiction and critical non-fiction on the weird, gothic horror and related subjects. He is a regular contributor to Sublime Horror and Dead Reckonings as well as a presenting delegate at conferences like Reimagining The Gothic and Fantastika. Daniel lives in Edinburgh with his wife and dog, and can be found on Twitter as @pietersender.