Buckie

Buckie Scottish Gaelic: Bucaidh
Population
OS grid reference	NJ425655
Council area	Moray
Lieutenancy area	Banffshire
Country	Scotland
Sovereign state	United Kingdom
Post town	BUCKIE
Postcode district	AB56 1xx
Dialling code	01542
Police	Scotland
Fire	Scottish
Ambulance	Scottish
UK Parliament	Moray
Scottish Parliament	Moray

Buckie (Gaelic: Bucaidh) is a burgh town on the Moray Firth coast of Scotland in Moray.

Cluny Harbour, with town in background

Buckie was the largest town in Banffshire by some thousands of inhabitants before regionalisation in 1975 removed that political division from the map of Scotland. The town is the third largest in the Moray Council area after Elgin and Forres.

Population

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%. However the figures as reported in 2001 are probably substantially out of date following the influx of many foreign workers from EU expansion countries (particularly Poland) since 2004.

Around Buckie

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 lying above the shoreline is Buckpool (formerly Nether Buckie) and on the shoreline there is The Yardie. To the east of Cluny Harbour lie Ianstown, Gordonsburgh and Portessie (formerly Port Eassie or Porteasie.) These communities were, to all intents and purposes, separate fishing communities which gradually merged. A new town was laid out above the shoreline in the 19th century and this is the rump of Buckie.

File:Buckpool Harbour.jpg

Buckpool Harbour with parts of Buckie in background - The Yardie on the shoreline and Seatown above

Buckie High School [1] is located on West Cathcart Street. Directly opposite from the original and still functioning old building of the school is Cluny Primary School (Buckie Primary School until 1974.) There are three further primary schools in the town - Millbank Primary School on McWilliam Crescent in the newer mid-southern part of Buckie, St. Peter's RC Primary School in Buckpool and Portessie Primary School. Additional primary schools in Portgordon, Findochty, Portknockie and Cullen contribute to the roll of Buckie High School. The small communities of Arradoul, Drybridge, Rathven and Lintmill also contribute to the BHS roll.

The Port of Buckie

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 a mere mile 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 David and Thomas Stevenson of Edinburgh, respectively uncle and father 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 granite 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 NE 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 [2] now repairs and refits RNLI lifeboats for much of the United Kingdom 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 Bus Brae or Bowling Green Brae, the view of the sea would have been interrupted by a huge grey corrugated iron shed. This was Thompsons and vessels were launched directly into the sea from a slipway. Heading east to Cluny Harbour it would have been impossible to miss Herd and Mackenzie on the third 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. Thompsons is gone but the premises of Herd and McKenzie and Jones are part of the modern day Buckie Shipyard. It was Herd and McKenzie 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.

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 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 a mile or so inland from the town and is best known for the Inchgower Single Malt.

Railways

File:North Church.jpg

North Church and Cluny Square seen over the redeveloped trackbed of the former GNSR

At one time Buckie had excellent rail connections with the rest of North East Scotland. The Great North of Scotland Railway was laid out in the 1850s and served the Aberdeen to Inverness route until it was decommissioned in the late 1960s. In 1923 GNSR was absorbed into the London and North Eastern Railway before that itself was nationalised along with all other UK rail services into British Rail in 1948. This construction did not reach the coast until Nairn and various branch lines were built to link the peripheral areas to the mainline service.

The Moray Coast Railway was also constructed by GNSR and the part of it that served Buckie, opening in 1886, ran from Cairnie near Keith down to the coast at Portsoy and then swung west through Cullen, Portnockie and Findochty reaching its first stop in Buckie at Portessie. This station was built directly on top of the cliff and commanded panoramic views over the Strathlene House Hotel, Strathlene outdoor swimming pool and beach and onward to the offshore rocks of Craigenroan and the Moray Firth. Indeed a footpath led from the station down to the hotel and beach area and a visit to Strathlene was a popular day out by train during World War II. A retired passenger carriage was available for rent at the station. One mile to the west was Buckie Station which was located below the cliff and virtually across the street from Buckie Fish Market. To reach Buckie Station the railway gently descended to the west from the heights of Portessie on an embankment to the foot of the cliff whilst the parallel road lying parallel to the track rose to the west up the McLaren's Brae end of East Church Street to the town centre. One mile further west stood Buckpool Station and from there the line continued due west to Portgordon and onward to Spey Bay before crossing the River Spey and swinging inland to rejoin the mainline service at Elgin. Buckie was served by these three railway stations until 1968 when the line was finally closed.

Portessie was also terminus to the Buckie and Portessie Branch of the Highland Railway. This line was opened in 1884 and provided a direct rail link “up the hill” to Keith. The line ran westwards from Portessie but remained on top of the cliff, passing the Pot O' Linn, skirting the rear of Cliff Terrace and crossing Harbour Street then swinging south contributing to the curve of Mill Crescent to stop at Buckie Highland Station before continuing up present day Millbank Terrace towards Rathven. Until recent years this latter section was used as a footpath and commonly known as "The Highland Line" — it was quite possible to cycle from Millbank Terrace to the site of Rathven Station as late as the 1970s and even early 1980s — but housing development and farming interests have contributed to the virtual closure of this popular route to Peter Fair Park. The line then turned westwards again towards Drybridge and made another sweep to the south as it passed Enzie and then headed uphill, over the Enzie Braes, to Aultmore and on to Keith. This link was relatively short-lived and was closed in 1915 except for a freight service between Buckie and Portessie which closed in 1944.

It is possible to walk, or cycle along the route of the old railway from Cullen to Garmouth. This walk takes in the magnificent Cullen viaduct from which fine views of that town can be had and, at the other end, the Spey Bridge.

Religion

File:St Peters Buckie.jpg

St. Peter's, Buckie

As a traditional fishing community Buckie has always had an active religious life. However the casual observer would be excused for imagining that Buckie has an absolute obsession with Christianity, so numerous are the town’s churches representing almost every branch of Northern European Christian faith. The largest church is St. Peter's which stands on St. Andrews Square in Buckpool. This twin-spired red sandstone construction was originally planned to act as the cathedral for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Aberdeen when it was opened in 1857. This never came to pass and Buckie was left with what is arguably one of the grandest church in NE Scotland outside of Aberdeen. One of the reasons for this idea was that the Roman Catholic population per capita in the area around Buckie was one of the highest in post-Reformation Scotland. St. Gregory's, built at Preshome near Buckie in 1788, was the first post-reformation church to be built in Scotland that looked like a church - prior to that date Roman Catholic places of worship were designed to look anonymous and resembled farm buildings or similar and a superbly preserved example of this is St. Ninian's at Tynet about 4 miles to the west of Buckie. The largest Church of Scotland congregation worships at Buckie North Church on Cluny Square. This building houses the town clock and was opened in 1879. There are other Church of Scotland congregations in addition to Methodist, Salvation Army, Episcopal, Baptist, Brethren and other congregational churches.

Leisure

As is typical of towns in the area Buckie is well served by golf courses with the eastern and western edges of the community ending in 18 holes. To the eastern extremity on a spectacular clifftop lies Strathlene Golf Course which stretches almost all the way to the village of Findochty and to the west, also on a clifftop, lies Buckpool Golf Club [3] which reaches a good part of the way to the village of Portgordon.

Adjacent to Buckie High School is Victoria Park, home of Buckie Thistle Football Club [4]. Although The Jags have been consistently high finishers in the Highland Football League in recent years the league title has eluded the club since it was last won in 1958. That was in a decade when all trophies available were won with regularity and it was during this era that Buckie Thistle travelled to Hampden Park to meet Queen's Park in a Scottish Cup 4th round replay on October 30th 1954, prevailing 2-1 and at the same time becoming the first and, still to this day, the only senior non-league club to have won a competitive match at the national stadium. The go-ahead board has extensively developed the stadium in recent years and a function suite was built within the perimeter of the ground so that match-goers can now enjoy more sophisticated licenced and catering facilities pre- and post-match at the match venue.

In Buckpool, and next door to Buckpool Golf Club, is the Merson Park home of Buckie Rovers Football Club. The Rovers are members of the Scottish Junior Football Association and play in that body's North Region Division One. At one time they played at Victoria Park as well, alternating home fixtures with their senior cousins but when Buckie Thistle were suffering one episode of extreme financial duress the decision was taken to move to a new facility in the municipal Merson Park. As a club they have always played in the shadow of Buckie Thistle but they have a core of devotees who will always keep the Rovers going. The Merson Park ground is fairly rudimentary with only the perimeter fence and dugouts differentiating it from a municipal pitch and there are no covered or seated facilities at all.

Near the southern edge of town on High Street lies Linzee Gordon Park. This is home to Buckie Cricket Club [5], which has a very long history with numerous Macallan North of Scotland Cricket Association League [6] titles in recent years (four in the past six seasons to be specific) on top of various league and cup wins in the 1990s including two wins in the prestigious Scottish Cricket Union Small Clubs Cup, specifically in 1995 and 1997. BCC built a modern pavilion to replace their aging home and this was opened in June 1998. The construction was partly funded by sportscotland and the National Lottery. Linzee Gordon Park, also has a municipal pavilion along with adjoining pitch for football use.

Bowling is a popular pastime in Buckie and the town boasts two greens. Buckie Bowling Club is on North High Street and Low Street with attractive views over the Moray Firth from the clubhouse. Victoria Bowling Club sits on West Church Street adjacent to Victoria Bridge and the Buckie Burn flowing below.

Buckie has a 25m swimming pool which was built next to Buckie High School in 1975.[7]

Buckie is at the end of the Speyside Way long distance footpath. There is magnificent coastal scenery all along the Banff coast, with easy access to areas such as Glenlivet, Speyside and the Cairngorms.

External links

• Buckie & District Fishing Heritage Centre
• 1st Buckie Company Boys' Brigade - Largest UK company
• Buckie Weather collected from station on the Ice Factory