Crail, Shoregate, Gasworks and Harbour. View from west.

Description Crail, Shoregate, Gasworks and Harbour. View from west.

Date c. 1890

Collection Papers of Erskine Beveridge, antiquarian, Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland

Catalogue Number F 1990

Category Photographs and Off-line Digital Images

Copies SC 739222

Scope and Content Harbour and Gas Works, Crail, Fife Crail, a picturesque fishing port with a small tidal harbour, sits on the eastern tip of the Fife peninsula overlooking the North Sea. The Scottish photographer, Erskine Beveridge, photographed Crail c.1890, providing some of the oldest known photographic records of the town. The harbour, reached by a steep descent from Shoregate (right), forms a safe mooring for the town's fleet of tall masted fishing boats. Most of the houses leading down to the harbour date from the 17th and 18th centuries, but the gas works (centre), with its tall brick chimney and high retaining wall, is a 19th-century intrusion. Gas works were usually built near harbours so that the coal required for coal-gas manufacture could be easily landed. Coal gas, a mixture of hydrogen, methane, sulphurous compounds and carbon monoxide, was extracted from coal and used for domestic heating and lighting as well as industrial processes throughout the Victorian period. Pitch, a useful by-product, was used extensively as a waterproofing material on local fishing vessels. Source: RCAHMS contribution to SCRAN.

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