St Monance, East Shore. General view from the West.

Description St Monance, East Shore. General view from the West.

Date c. 1890

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

Catalogue Number SC 747710

Category On-line Digital Images

Copy of F 2035

Scope and Content Harbour, St Monans, Fife, from the west St Monans, a small fishing port with a natural tidal harbour, sits on the east coast of Fife overlooking the Firth of Forth. This photograph, taken by Erskine Beveridge c.1903, is one of the earliest photographic records of the harbour and the fleet of sailing drifters that fished out of the port. This double-basined harbour has a narrow approach from the sea. The original central pier, dating from 1596, is flanked on the east by the L-shaped leg of the East Pier, constructed in 1865 by the engineers, David & Thomas Stevenson, and to the west by the short West Pier, built in 1902 by Charles Stevenson who also deepened both basins. The sailing drifters are of the 'Fifie' type, a local design of two-masted boat which had a characteristic vertical stem and stern. In the early 1900s there were over 100 sail boats, mainly drifters, using the tidal harbour. Most were built by James N Miller & Sons, a long-established boatbuilding family and a major employer in the town who had been building fishing boats for over 100 years, using the harbour basins and its slipways to fit them out. Source: RCAHMS contribution to SCRAN.

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File Format (TIF) Tagged Image File Format bitmap