The rescue of Kincardineshire’s coastal heritage

April 2009

Old Portlethen: Like Skateraw (part of modern Newtonhill) it has a decent landing beach. Boats were hauled ashore, originally by hand, later with the use of windlasses.

by Craig Whyte

Environmental knowledge. For city-based ecology graduates like me, it is all too often a product of textbooks, of field trips and weekend walkabouts. But for countless generations of Kincardineshire fisherfolk it has been common currency, something acquired from their elders – in near-osmotic fashion – from an early age.

With its rocky shores, towering cliffs and jutting headlands the Kincardineshire coast is wild and beautiful, but it can be treacherous too. For the Stonehaven lifeboat crew, high-tech equipment is important, but first-hand knowledge of this temperamental coastline in all its guises is crucial when time is short.

Maritime Rescue Institute (MRI) is the operator of the Stonehaven lifeboat, one of several independent stations that, along with RNLI, help safeguard the lives of sea users. MRI, though, is also an internationally-renowned training centre for search and rescue operators from around the globe. In my few months with MRI I have met trainees from around Europe, from Australia even, all jetting in to attend one of the courses on offer at the understated grey building at the end of Old Stonehaven Pier that is MRI headquarters.

I return to my desk, turning my back on my sea view window, and resume my search – the reason I have been invited to take up temporary residence with MRI – a virtual journey through hundreds of years of social history of the Kincardineshire coast.

My challenge is this – to recapture something of the first-hand knowledge of the coastal environment that was inherent in the local fishing community. This in turn will be adopted by the Stonehaven lifeboat crew and used to help illustrate the vital link between local environmental knowledge and survival at sea.

The Kincardineshire coast has been fished for hundreds of years… at least. Several of its fishing communities have medieval origins. At times there were a dozen or more fishing villages dotted along the coast – Gourdon, Johnshaven and Stonehaven are just the ones that have survived longest. Some, like Shieldhill and Crawton are mere shells, the skeletal remains of once active communities. Others have developed into something new – Catterline as a haven for lovers of art and seafood, Portlethen as a satellite of Aberdeen.

Naval press gangs

But there was the same testing environment for each generation, and the 18th century menace of naval press gangs, stealing away the youth of communities, sapping the spirit of those who were spared. There were fluctuating fish stocks and markets, and the gradual centralisation of fishing at larger ports – at Aberdeen, Peterhead and Fraserburgh.

Harbours, one might think, are a prerequisite of any fishing village, but on the northern coast of Kincardineshire they are conspicuous by their absence. Yet there was one every mile or so, each perched on a cliff top with tracks that wound their way down to near-hidden coves or beaches where boats were accommodated in semi-shelter.

Old Portlethen and Skateraw (part of modern Newtonhill) have decent landing beaches. Here, boats were hauled ashore, originally by hand, later with the use of windlasses. Downies had no such beach, but the rusty windlasses embedded on sharp slopes show that this was no insurmountable obstacle.

It’s a formidable coastline – cliff-bound, lacking proper shelter, with treacherous rocks lurking just offshore. Its fishermen would have required great skill – and courage – to eke a year-round living from the sea.

The herring boom arrived in the 19th century, and local boats were kitted out to take advantage. Some sailed initially to the Moray Firth; later sailing anything from a few miles to 90 miles offshore in their open-topped boats. At the height of the boom in 1883 there were 110 herring boats fishing from Stonehaven harbour, employing 688 fishers and providing work for 52 coopers and 324 gutters and packers.

At times, salmon fishing sustained families through the summer months. At St Cyrus stake nets were used – nets fixed by wooden stakes plunged deep into inter-tidal sand – a practice carried on here for centuries and only recently come to an end.

North of St Cyrus, however, there are no soft sands. Salmon fishers based at Cowie, Portlethen and Cove operated off a less compliant coast, sailing their cobbles miles from their safe havens to well-known locations beneath the cliffs of north Kincardineshire. Here bag nets were fixed to the seabed by way of an array of ship-style anchors. Some of these can still be seen at Cowie, along with the net drying poles and decaying cobbles.

Creel fishing for crabs and lobsters became increasingly important in later times. But it was line fishing that, for centuries, was the staple of the Kincardineshire fishermen. Fishing grounds known in the 18th and 19th centuries were visited by local line-fishermen well into the second half of the 20th century. The method, in essence, had changed little for hundreds of years.

Nigg in the 1790s

As I return to my desk, to my text books, my electronic reams of statistics, I know that my office-based efforts have taken me only so far. I need to start learning about the day-to-day lives of the creel and line fishers. It’s time to start talking, to make meaningful connections with real people.

I gaze out of the small side window at the three small shellfish boats nestled against the harbour wall. Each has a crew of one, and each fisherman is landing his catch of crabs on the quayside, ready for the short drive to the shellfish merchants down the coast in Gourdon and Johnshaven. They are the last working representatives of a community that dominated this harbour for more than 200 years.

The fishermen’s presence in the harbour is fleeting. They load their vans and are gone, and I have missed my chance to speak to them.

It was not without cause that the fisher folk were known, historically, as ‘a people apart’. Their customs, their traditions, their dress, their beliefs, set them apart from their agrarian neighbours just inland. According to the Old Statistical Account for the Parish of Nigg, written in the 1790s, ‘no land man becomes a fisher’; although women could join a fishing community, it seems that they first had to be ‘trained’ in the duties of a fishwife.

The two communities did interact; 18th and 19th century fishwives would trek for up to 20 miles, loaded down with heavy creels, to barter with the farming folk for such staples as flour and eggs – but the cultural divide was clear.

It seems to me that something of this separate identity remains. The pleasure craft bobbing cheekily around the harbour combine cruelly to make the fishermen look almost out of place, an anachronism, in a place which, by rights, should be theirs.

Eventually I get a chance to speak to the fishermen, and learn something about the modern-day creel fishing along the rugged coast. But for each of these few men still working the shellfish grounds, I know that there must be at least a handful of retired fisherfolk still living on the coast, men and women who, though assimilated into modern, mainstream society, still guard precious memories of older times – of the days of the line fishing.

But where do I begin my search? Clearly, as an out-and-out outsider (I’m not even from the N-E!) I will need a personal introduction to this apparently secretive society.

Celia Craig, a retired teacher from a Gourdon fishing family, offers herself as a go-between, my insider in the community. She sets up meetings with two octogenarians in her home village – Andrew Gove Cargill, known locally as Govie, and James Lownie. Govie and Jamesie were born in Gourdon, one day apart, in 1921. Both spent their entire working lives in the village, save for serving in the Navy, and still live a stone’s throw apart near the waterfront.

I am expecting the two men to be reticent, guarded in the face of my probing questions, and I wonder fleetingly if they, in return, are expecting some sign of my trustworthiness – some coded handshake, perhaps. But both are open and welcoming and it takes no time before my patchy picture of the past is filled out with personal detail. I sit entranced as the past begins to take shape.

Govie and the other fishermen knew the grounds – the landscape of the seabed – and they knew the coast, its features and landmarks. It was these rather than GPS or other sophisticated navigation system that they depended on. Sometimes they didn’t have to go far. At the turn of the year the haddock came ‘in bye’ to spawn on sands close to Gourdon.

The Shald Water (Montrose Bank)

Govie speaks enthusiastically of these days of plenty. “Ye jist hid ti come oot o the herber, shoot and ye come in (with) 10, 12, 20 boxes.”

At other times the Gourdon fishers sailed about 16 miles to ‘the Shald Water’ (Montrose Bank) or ‘the Hirst’ off Newtonhill.

When the fish were landed, merchants like Jamesie were waiting to whisk boxes of fine, fresh cod and haddock off to markets near and far. Fish so-caught were said to be of higher quality, their bodies unscathed by the crushing inflicted on their net-caught counterparts, and there remained a good market for Gourdon whitefish for much of the 20th century.

But the fish were hard-won. Line fishing is a labour intensive method. Hundreds of hooks attached to lines many hundreds of metres long had to be individually baited, usually with mussels, which had been individually ‘shieled’, by hand. This was the task of the women, who rose at around 4 o’clock throughout the chill, dark mornings of winter to begin shieling the mussels and baiting the lines. These repetitive, hard-on-the-hands tasks could take up to eight hours, after which the fishwife was ‘free’ to begin her other household chores. Often children helped their mothers, shieling a jar or two of mussels before heading out to school.

For centuries line-fishing was carried on from open-topped sailing boats – Fifies, Zulus and baldies were some of the types used in the 19th century. In time, most fishing vessels were fitted with motors, the majority had small wheelhouses, but many of the boats fishing this coast in the 1960s and even 1970s were still essentially Fifies, their crewmen still practising the traditional method – right down to the hauling in by hand – that they had learnt from their fathers and uncles, practical skills passed down through several centuries.

Part of the project’s remit is to involve local people, particularly schools, in the search for the villages’ past. We invited Kincardineshire’s primary schools to take part and now seven schools are engaged in heritage projects built upon such creative activities as song-writing, storytelling, book-writing and film-making.

The pupils of Catterline have been working with singer Christine Kydd, exploring their village’s rich heritage through song. As part of their investigations the kids have interviewed 90-year-old Ruby Coull, who baited lines for her fisherman husband and still lives in one of Catterline’s white cliff-top cottages. Gradually, an original song emerges, a musical portrait of a village life that is past, but which the children have revisited in their imaginations.

Down the road in Johnshaven, primary school pupils are engaged in film-making under the guidance of the Aberdeenshire Media Unit. They have been making a film about the history of their village, about the coastal heritage that survives there to this day.

Shellfish boats in Gourdon harbour

Meanwhile in Gourdon, pupils have been invited to interview Govie and Jamesie in the very school that the two men attended some 80 years before. As I watch the children’s eyes light up, the captivated look on their faces, I feel that a vital connection has been made across the generations, bridging a gap between two ways of life sharing a place, but separated by time.

Just down the hill from the school, things are quiet in Gourdon harbour. A few shellfish boats remain, but the forest of fishing-boat masts that graced the harbour 40 years ago is gone.

The line-fishing declined steeply in the 1970s and 1980s. Trawlers from Aberdeen were increasingly encroaching on local waters, scraping the grounds that had been harvested gently by line for hundreds of years.

Back at MRI, the management committee and staff wait eagerly for the results of the project. It is May 2008 and at last the culmination of months of research, interviews, writing, photography and film-making – are all distilled into one CD-rom and one DVD.

Has the project succeeded in capturing some of that elusive commodity, that intimate knowledge of local coast and sea? Well, perhaps we’ve scratched the surface. But we have gone a long way toward blowing the dust off the albums of past life, uncovering for a new generation the secrets, hardships and delights. Perhaps it will prompt the young folk to develop their own understanding of their coast. They might never set a line or haul a creel but, who knows, a few of them might one day join MRI’s lifeboat crew.

As I watch the lifeboat return to base, having steered another uncertain sailor to safety, I know that something of the spirit, and the knowledge, of the Kincardineshire fishermen of old, lives on in the MRI.

CD/DVD packs are available from the Maritime Rescue Institute, Old Pier, Stonehaven, AB39 2JU; 01569 765768, or email enquiry.mri@btconnect.com

Craig Whyte, a former ecologist, now works as a freelance writer and heritage project worker based in Peterculter. He was co-ordinator of the Maritime Rescue Institute’s Heritage Lottery-funded Coastal Heritage Project.

This is an article from the April 2009 edition of Leopard Magazine. To read much more like this every month, subscribe to Leopard Magazine.