Today Friday 19th April 2019 I visited the beautiful fishing town of Buckie, on the Moray coast about 50 miles from my home, Scotland enjoyed magnificent weather and with 22 degrees of sunshine heat I made the most of my day , I packed my car early leaving for my adventure , I arrived back home at 2130pm , I had a great day .
Buckie (Scottish Gaelic: Bucaidh
is a burgh town (defined as such in 1888) on the Moray Firth coast of Scotland.
Historically in Banffshire, Buckie was the largest town in the county by some thousands of inhabitants before 1975, when the administrative county was abolished.
The town is the third largest in the Moray council area after Elgin and Forres and within the definitions of statistics published by the General Register Office for Scotland was ranked at number 75 in the list of population estimates for settlements in Scotland mid-year 2006.
Buckie lies virtually equidistant to Banff to the east and Elgin to the west with both communities being approximately 17 miles (27 kilometres) distant whilst Keith lies 12 mi (19 km) to the south by road.
Etymology
The origin of the name of the town has caused some debate and although the folk etymology is that Buckie is named after a seashell (genus buccinum) the reality is that the shared marine background is merely a coincidence.
The name Buckie would originally have occurred in identifying a place that was not immediately adjacent to the sea so we must seek alternative etymological sources.
Unfortunately, in one of the earlier books on Scottish place names, Buckie on the Moray Firth does not receive a mention although Buckie, spelt the same way, in the Balquhidder district of Perthshire is described as being derived from the Gaelic word boc or Welsh bowk, both meaning a buck or male deer, so this would suggest the meaning of Buckie as place where male deer gather and this specifically would most likely have been the valley of what is known today as the Buckie Burn.
In an article by a Dr Cramond in 1936[5] he speaks of the earliest mention of Buckie being in 1362 when the lands of Rove Bucky in le Awne were leased by John Hay to John Young, vicar of Fordyce.
The Hays, of whom the Rannes family have descended, had acquired through Royal favour a footing in the district at a still earlier age when the greater part from the Deveron to the Spey was embraced in the Forest of Awne or Ainie (now Enzie) and the Boyne. Rove Bucky is far from understandable and could be a scribe’s error and should perhaps read Over Bucky as occurs in older title deeds, in contra distinction to Nether Buckie. It has been spelt in different ways, Robert Burns called it Bucky in his poem Lady Onlie – Lady Lucky. This was the form at the end of the 18th century.
Robert Gordon’s map Aberdeen, Banf, Murrey &c. to Inverness: [and] Fra the north water to Ross, which is dated at some time between 1636-1652, shows Buckie in its own right as a community some small distance from the coast with the community of Freuchny sitting nearer the shore to the north. Robert Gordon and Joan Blaeu’s Duo Vicecomitatus Aberdonia & Banfia, una cum Regionibus & terrarum tractibus sub iis comprehensis published in Amsterdam 1654 clearly shows Buckie and Freuchny with the addition of Nether Buckie.
James Robertson’s Topographical and military map of the counties of Aberdeen, Banff and Kincardine,
London, 1822 seems geographically inaccurate in its relative positioning of Buckie, Nether Buckie and Freuchny, but is significant in that the new label of Rotten Slough is given equal importance in terms of size of community with Buckie; however, in Thomson’s Atlas of Scotland,
Edinburgh, 1832 Rotten Slough is fairly unimportant by size so one of these two reference publications is distorted, probably the former. This community, which would later come to be known as Portessie, was reportedly formed when "Porteasie…..became a fishing station in 1727, when 5 houses were built by the proprietor of Rannes for the accommodation of the original fishers from Findhorn" and the 1731 Rathven Session Minutes shows that Rotten Slough already has a population of 40 with ten households and subsequent minutes show the community growing until the 1791 entry records 177 souls in 44 households.
By the time of the publication of the 1891 First Series Ordnance Survey Map of Elgin, which reflects the 1866-1870 survey, Buckie has developed markedly with areas named Seatown, Newtown, Ianstown and Portessie.
The 19th century OS Six Inch series further shows Gordonsburgh, Craig Bow and Strathlene.
The 1910 OS 3rd Edition one-inch map of Elgin has settled on the name of Ianstown and all other parts of Buckie are named as they are known today but then, just to confuse the issue, the Bartholomew Survey Atlas of Scotland,
Edinburgh, 1912 uses the label Ianston. The conflicting nomenclature continued with the issue of the 1929 OS One-inch Popular edition and the 1933 JG Bartholomew & Son, Half-inch to the Mile maps of Scotland.
Layout today
Geographically, the town is, broadly speaking, laid out in a linear fashion, following the coastline. There is a lower shore area and an upper area. Fundamentally Buckie itself is the central part of the community lying between the Victoria Bridge under which flows the Buckie Burn at the western end of West Church Street, the eastern end of Cluny Harbour and above the shore area.
To the west of Victoria Bridge and the Buckie Burn is Buckpool, which was formerly known as Nether Buckie, and on the shoreline, west of Cluny Harbour, between Baron Street and the Buckie Burn mouth, there is The Yardie. Immediately above The Yardie on the Buckie side of the burn is The Seatown. To the west of The Yardie is Harbourhead. To the east of Cluny Harbour lie Ianstown, Gordonsburgh and Portessie also known locally as The Sloch (historically The Rotten Slough), which reaches towards Strathlene.
These communities were, to all intents and purposes, separate fishing settlements that gradually merged over the course of time. A new town was laid out above the shoreline in the 19th century and this is the rump of Buckie.
The 2001 UK Census reported that, from Buckie’s total population 92.11%, were born in Scotland with the largest single minority being those born in England (5.58%.) In terms of declared ethnic allegiance the Scottish figure rose to 93.61%.
As a port
Cluny Harbour is probably still the true heart of Buckie and this project was built by the Cluny family in 1877 to replace the town’s first stone harbour in Nether Buckie, which was constructed in 1857 1 mile (2 km) or so to the west but had a tendency to silt up and become unusable.
The Laird of Letterfourie had contributed £5,000 of the construction costs at Nether Buckie but the main investor with the balance of £10,000 was the Board of Fisheries. The engineers were D.&T. Stevenson of Edinburgh, the family firm of the author Robert Louis Stevenson.
It was and remains a very sturdily built edifice with the main walls of considerable thickness being built of quartzite, quarried locally at Strathlene, capped with a very hard type of sandstone, which was also used to form the walls at the entrance and of the harbour proper.
As regards stability the harbour has remained a monument to engineering science with very little maintenance ever being necessary. It had a design fault, however, in that the entrance opened to the north east and was subject to infill with shingle, moving westwards by longshore drift.
Later known as Buckpool Harbour, this earlier port became something of an eyesore and eventually the silted basin became overgrown and dangerously swampy. The decision was taken to fill in the basin and this work was undertaken in the 1970s.
The resulting park includes a pebble beach and the original quartzite harbour walls remain completely intact.
Industry
Once a thriving fishing and shipbuilding port, these industries have declined. Indeed, although Peterhead and Aberdeen are more readily associated with the fishing industry in Northeast Scotland, by 1913 Buckie had the largest steam drifter fleet in Scotland.
Food processing remains important, with large fish factories and smoke houses found around the harbour. Buckie can properly be regarded as one of the main points of origin of the modern Scottish shellfish industry.
A Mancunian, Charles Eckersley, who moved to Buckie in the 1950s and started trading as a fish merchant, noticed that many of the varieties of shellfish that were regarded as economically useless by Buckie fishing vessels (prawns, scallops etc.) were in fact the same species that he had enjoyed whilst completing his National Service in Palestine. He seized the opportunity to exploit this gap in the market and he built a thriving processing and packing business, which eventually expanded to include factories as far afield as Barcelona and Alicante in Spain.
The Buckie Shipyard now repairs and refits RNLI lifeboats for much of the United Kingdom[26] and operates service contracts for various other clients including the MoD as well as building new vessels but boatbuilding was a major industry in the town for decades. Until recent years there were three quite separate boatyards building traditional wooden clinker fishing vessels. Leaving Cluny Square and heading down North High Street, also locally known as the Bowling Green Brae, the view of the sea would have been interrupted by a huge grey corrugated iron shed.
This was Thomsons and vessels were launched directly into the Moray Firth from a slipway. Heading east to Cluny Harbour it would have been impossible to miss Herd and Mackenzie on the fourth or lifeboat basin of the harbour. Directly behind their large sheds and across Blantyre Terrace was Jones with their private harbour into which they launched their vessels.
Thomsons is gone but the premises of Herd and McKenzie and Jones are part of the modern day Buckie Shipyard. It was Herd and McKenzie, a firm with its roots in Dunbartonshire from where Messrs Herd and Mackenzie sortied north, which built and launched the training schooner Captain Scott in 1972.
At the time of its launch, this vessel was the largest of its type in the world. In earlier years, there were further boat construction operations dotted along the shoreline from The Yardie to Ianstown and on to Portessie but these had mostly been amalgamated into the three main firms or had gone out of business by the interwar period.
A significant part of the population works in the offshore oil industry although Buckie somewhat missed the boat with the North Sea boom. In the late 1970s, there were extensive plans drawn up to extend Cluny Harbour out to the Mucks reef with the intention of serving oilfield supply vessels. Nothing came of this but every now and then the idea rears its head once more to be met with great enthusiasm before failing to get off the ground again.
Buckie was home to a specialist electric lamp factory of Thorn EMI until 1987 when it was closed and production moved to a new plant in Leicestershire. All of the predominantly female staff were offered jobs at the new facility in the East Midlands but, as the vast majority of the labour force were second wage earners in families, this offer was almost universally rejected.
Buckie is home to the Inchgower Distillery,which sits 1 mile (2 km) or so inland from the town and is best known for the Inchgower Single Malt.
Herd & McKenzie Shipbuilders
Type – Private
IndustryShipbuilding
Founded1903
FounderJames Herd & Thomas McKenzie
HeadquartersBuckie, UK
Services
Buckie Shipyard built, converted, refitted and repaired ferries, tugs, workboats, yachts, pilot boats, MOD vessels, small cruise vessels, diving vessels, lifeboats, fishing boats and fish farm cages. They slipped vessels up to 850 tonnes in displacement and 70 metres in length.
A new 1,600 sq. metres refit facility opened in 2003, including a state-of-the-art temperature and humidity controlled paint spray booth, capable of taking vessels up to 21m in length, 6m in beam and up to 50 tonnes.
A 50-ton hydraulic slipway hoist transported vessels directly from the inner basin at Buckie Harbour into the refit hall.
The Royal National Lifeboat Institution had been a major client for over 60 years, with all classes of RNLI lifeboat undergoing refit.
In its last few years the yard delivered two aluminium windfarm service catamarans, Penmon Point[6] and Lynas Point to Turbine Transfers, for work in Belgiu] and similar vessels followed.
