General view from south west

Description General view from south west

Date c. 1885

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

Catalogue Number SC 739228

Category On-line Digital Images

Copy of F 1907

Scope and Content Harbour, 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.1885, providing some of the oldest known photographic records of the town. The harbour, positioned in a natural haven on the coastline, is a stone-built structure with a narrow entrance on its west side. It originally consisted of a hook-shaped east pier (right) built in the late 15th or early 16th century, and reached by a steep descent from the town. In 1826-8 the straight west pier (left) was built to Robert Stevenson's designs, and further improvements to the harbour wall were completed in 1862. In the 1880s Crail was just beginning to recover from a century of decline in its fishing industry. The small harbour brought the town prosperity through trade with Holland and other European countries in the 16th and 17th centuries, and in the 18th century it was a major port for visiting Scottish herring boats from Angus and Aberdeenshire. However, in the 1790s the herring changed its pattern of migration in the North Sea, and the town's fishing industry was slow to recover, even after the herring returned to the Firth of Forth in the 1830s. Local fishermen, however, continued to land large quantities of crabs and lobsters. Source: RCAHMS contribution to SCRAN.

Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/collection/739228

File Format (TIF) Tagged Image File Format bitmap