Rugby legend Scott Hastings has revealed how he swims every week at the same spot where his late wife Jenny died, saying he finds it ‘beautiful and calming’.
Mrs Hastings took her own life in September 2024, after heading to her regular swimming spot Wardie Bay located to the north of Edinburgh.
However she was reported missing after failing to return from the water, having tied her flotation device to a buoy and carried on swimming.
After a large-scale search, her body was recovered a few days later on the couple’s 34th wedding anniversary.
Mrs Hastings, who was 60 years old when she died, had suffered mental health problems dating back to her teens, progressing to serious depression as an adult, including several suicide attempts.
Mr Hastings said that he swims every Friday at the popular open-water swimming location, an experience he finds ‘beautiful and calming’, although his mind ‘wanders out to the buoy where she was’.
Now a sports commentator after an illustrious career as a Scotland and British Lions rugby union player, he described his late wife as a ‘water baby’, and said the couple had swum in the sea together for the first time during a cruise in the Norwegian fjords a month before she died.
The mother-of-two had swum every day for three weeks before her death, and Mr Hastings said that when he went to Wardie Bay to look for her, he ‘knew she’d gone’. He explained: ‘I saw her bag was there, I saw the buoy, but I didn’t see her.’
Scott Hastings pictured with wife Jenny in 2010.
Scott and Jenny Hastings on their wedding day
Speaking as the anniversary of her death approaches, he also said she didn’t leave a note, but did leave him a self-help book called Don’t Worry under his pillow, and had emptied her wardrobe and put all her clothes in bags to give to charity.
Mr Hastings, 60, has now said he feels no anger towards professionals who treated her, including a mental health nurse who visited her just hours before she disappeared, for not being able to prevent what happened.
But he told the Sunday Times: ‘There was a secrecy behind it. She carried out her plan. This was her wish. That I find very hard to come to terms with.’
The family later returned her ashes to the Firth of Forth and the former rugby star said: ‘That was the moment where she was free. I’ll never forget her. I’m just full of pride for her. She had seven catastrophic episodes in the last five years, and this one just became too unbearable for her.’
He is now supporting his friend and former Watsonian rugby club-mate Iain Sinclair with a swim spanning the 60-mile Caledonian Canal from Fort William to Inverness, from the Atlantic to the North Sea. The Sea2Sea challenge will raise money for good causes including mental health charity Mikeysline.
Mr and Mrs Hastings were ambassadors for mental health charity Support in Mind Scotland.
The sportsman, who was capped for Scotland 65 times and played on two British Lions Tours to Australia with his brother Gavin, said becoming an advocate for mental health was part of the ‘healing process’ for him.
Mr Hastings said when he was told his wife’s body had been found, he felt ‘at total peace – it was an extraordinary feeling’, but he was also ‘utterly broken-hearted’.
A major search was launched after Jenny Hastings disappeared from a wild swimming spot in the Firth of Forth last year.
‘There was a life ahead of us, and she didn’t see that. I miss her every day,’ added the rugby star, who has been treated for Non-Hodgkin lymphoma and prostate cancer.
He also described how his late wife’s ashes were returned to the water ‘because that was where she wanted to be’. ‘Yes, she struggled. But she was at peace in the water.’
The couple had previously spoken of her two-decade long mental health struggles.
In one incident Mrs Hastings went missing for 36 hours before being found ten miles from her home in Warriston, Edinburgh.
Opening up about the incident later, Mrs Hastings said: ‘I just wanted to get away. I wanted to be alone. I didn’t think anyone wanted me around anymore. It’s an awful illness.’
In 2014 she tried to take her own life by eating nuts in a bid to trigger a severe allergy, with Mr Hastings having to administer an adrenaline shot to save her life.
Describing the anguish his wife endures, Mr Hastings said at the time: ‘It’s clinical depression. When she is low it’s very difficult.’
