Wick was a boom town between the 1850s and 1930s and the population trebled each summer when 10,000 migrant workers came to harvest The Silver Darlings, as the seasonal shoals of herring were called.
This trail takes you to places where you can find out more, and where you can see the remnants of the herring fishing today.
Badbea is an abandoned village, perched on the edge of precipitous cliffs, facing into the North Sea. It’s well worth the walk to see the ruined houses and find out more about the lives of the people dumped there in the 1800s. The last resident left in 1911.
Badbea is not strictly part of the herring boom. It was created when Gaelic speaking Highlanders were forcibly evicted from townships in the straths and glens during the 1830s and ’40s, when the people were replaced with with sheep. The Highlanders were relocated to coastal crofts where they were expected to learn subsistence farming and fishing. Fisher folk were uneducated, the rich people reasoned, so how hard could it be? The people of Badbea would certainly have fished for the Silver Darlings each summer, either locally or maybe walking to Wick.
The Clearances and the Herring Fishing were both attempts to “improve” rural Scotland in the early 1800s. They were both the product of Scottish Enlightenment ideas, ideas first thought up in far-away Edinburgh in the late 1700s.
Author Neil Gunn was born in Dunbeath, and wrote the classic book, The Silver Darlings, about the lives of Highlanders as they battled to make a new living on the coast. It’s rich in explaining the history, heritage and hardship of the people and their lives.
A crofter’s year included planting and lobster-fishing in the spring, cutting peats in the early summer, before the men and young women left to fish and gut herring for six weeks. They returned to the crofts in September to bring in crops and dig potatoes, and spent the winter fishing cod, or making herring nets.
The museums at Dunbeath and Latheron are worth dropping into in their own right, and both have sections on Neill Gunn.
This dog-friendly, kid-friendly visitor centre is tucked away next to Lybster Harbour. It is a great stop off, with a lovely wee café, friendly staff, interesting events, and lots of accessible information about the men who fished for the herring, and the women who processed them.
Lybster Harbour was expanded from the 1790s throughout the early 1800s, and by 1859 it was the third busiest fishing port in Scotland after Wick and Fraserburgh, with 357 boats based there, supporting some 3,200 people, almost half of whom were fishermen. The visitor centre presents this history in a way that’s accessible for children and adults alike.
Lybster Harbour was transformed into Port Leith in the Falklands Isles in Season 4, episode 4 of The Crown.
Whaligoe is famous for the over 300 steps leading down to the tiny harbour at the bottom of precipitous cliffs. And of course, back up again.
The women would gird up their skirts and carry the men through the waves into their boats – the cold from the water was lethal to men spending days out at sea. And after then men had landed the herring, the women would gut and salt the fish in the harbour and then heft the herring up the steps and walk the seven miles to the merchants in Wick.
Parking is limited, so please don’t block the residents’ access. Come back if there is nowhere to park when you visit.
In the late 1700s, the great and good of Scotland created the gloriously named British Society for Extending the Fisheries and Improving the Sea Coasts of this Kingdom to co-ordinate investment in the harbours of Scotland and promote fishing as an industry.
To support the industry, Thomas Telford designed the first industrial new town on the south bank of the river. Poultneytown provided houses, work places, and a grass plot for mending nets.
The seasonal influx of people must have been overwhelming, with 10,000 men and women arriving for 6-8 weeks each summer trebling the population, bringing public disorder with them. The minister was horrified by the “increased … wickedness of the district” and the 54 public houses in the town, saying that “Multitudes can trace their ruin… to such seminaries of Satan and Belial.” However, he was untroubled by another wickedness; the long shadow of slavery reached into this remote corner of Scotland when middlemen bought barrels of preserved herring to sell to American plantation owners for their enslaved workers.
Explore the harbour and Pulteneytown in a 40 minute walk following the Telford Trail using the map and information boards on the route.
Telford also built the inner and outer harbours at Wick, which drew boats from as far as Norway, Holland, France, Cornwall and Ireland, as well as men and women from Caithness and Sutherland. The women and girls gutted the fish and packed them into the barrels in layers of salt.
Many other businesses in Wick supported the fishermen, including a ship yard, boat-building yards, saw-mills, rope-works, and a new iron-foundry, a distillery, a brewery, a grain mill, and a gas company.
Only the distillery remains, and the herring wifies are long gone too. When you walk round the harbour today, you are more likely to see blades or pylons being unloaded for the nearby windfarms. But you will also see the old fog cannon, and the newly restored metal gates of the old salt cellars.
In the summer, look out for the brown sails of the Isabella Fortuna, a traditional Fifie fishing vessel, lovingly repaired and restored by the Wick Heritage Society.
The communities here have long memories, because tragedies happened to family members even if they happened over a hundred years ago. On the 19th August 1848, disaster struck Wick and the communities of the far north when an unseasonable gale and and ebbing tide decimated the fleet, many of the men drowning in the chaos in the harbour itself. Wick alone lost 37 men, who left 17 widows and 63 children, and total losses in the far north were 94 lives and 30 boats. In the days when no-one received public support, this was devastating for the individuals and the communities.
This is just one of the events commemorated by the Seafarers’ Memorial, unveiled in 2023, which is dedicated to all those lost at sea associated with boats with the town’s WK registration. The figure represents the sea itself, bringing both life in the form of fish in its right hand, and death as its left hand points to the plaques below.
Spend a morning or afternoon in Wick Heritage Centre to get a feel for the lived of people working in the herring industry, and life here in Caithness in times gone by.
There is a fascinating video of the coopers explaining how they made barrels, an astonishingly skilled wood-working trade.
There is a host of other information about the Herring Fishing, like the men’s’ ganseys (pullovers), each with a unique pattern, for the grim purpose of identifying their bodies, if they were drowned.
It is sometimes possible to be be photographed in Victorian Dress as part of the exhibitions of photographs from the Johnston Collection – a collection of thousands of photographs spanning a hundred years of people’s lives taken by three generations of the same family in Wick.
Staxigoe was the first port in Europe to “salt the herring”; in the 1600s and 1700s the Dutch fishing fleet spent weeks off-shore, and salted the fish out at sea. The British government tried this approach, but eventually settled on supporting smaller boats with the salting and packing happening on land. Before Wick’s double harbours were built in the 1830s, Staxigoe was the largest Herring station in Europe and up to 50 boats could anchor there.
Staxigoe village has changed since then, and people sometimes assume it is a twentieth-century suburb of Wick. In the 1940s, new houses replaced the traditional houses here. The old houses had been built of Caithness Stone and were roofed with red tiles, imported as ballast on Dutch fishing boats. This replacement of old houses with new was quite common in Scotland during the 20th century across the Hebrides, the North Highlands, Orkney and Shetland. Old cottages were abandoned or even demolished and replaced with newly built houses that are warm and dry.
My name is Ben, and though I grew up inland, I love living near the sea, here in Caithness. I also love finding out more about the people and history of Caithness, so I am doing a degree in Scottish History with the University of the Highlands and Islands.
Being human matters. This blog post was written and researched by me, without using AI.
