Wick

Wick Harbour and Town

Wick, which was for nearly 500 years the administrative centre of Caithness, lies on the east coast of northern Scotland, some 15 miles south of Duncansby Head. The name comes from the Norse for Bay and it was the Vikings who first used the mouth of the River Wick where it flows into Wick Bay as a harbour for their longships and trading vessels.

Bridge Street High Street Wick Harbour River Wick

Wick today still has the feel of a town that revolves around its harbour and its seafaring traditions, almost like an Aberdeen in miniature. The irony is that for much of its life, most of Wick's trade and fishing took place via the tiny hamlets of Papigoe and Staxigoe and their better sheltered but much smaller harbours just along the coast to the north east.

Wick Airport

Railway Station

Town Hall

This started to change when Sir John Sinclair of Ulbster built a quay at Wick in 1768 in order to omote the town as a centre for herring fishing. Progress was very slow and in 1780 under 400 barrels of salted fish were caught and processed. But the British Fisheries Society stepped in during the 1780s and within a decade 200 fishing boats were based in Wick and the annual catch had increased to 13,000 barrels of salted herring.

Harbour improvements by Thomas Telford followed in 1810. He also bridged the River Wick, improving the connections between Wick on the north bank and Pulteneytown on the south bank.

An additional pier followed in 1831, though the following year there was a setback when an outbreak of cholera in Wick led many fishermen to move to Peterhead. Despite this the fishing industry in Wick continued to thrive. The boom years were between 1860 and 1890, when at any given time there were around 1000 fishing boats operating out of Wick Harbour.

The fishing boats directly employed around 6,000 fishermen and provided work for another 6,000 land-based workers, including net makers and the women who gutted, salted and layered the herrings. This figure included as many as 300 coopers solely engaged in making barrels for salted herring. The fishing industry also supported a fleet of larger ships manned by a further 1,000 seamen, simply bringing in salt, and wood for barrels, and exporting the processed fish. And at its height this activity kept in business for no fewer than 45 pubs in the town, plus a distillery and a brewery. To put all this in perspective, Wick's total population today is around 8,000.

Failure to take steps to conserve stocks meant that the herring was fished out by the early 1900s and in 1930 fewer than 30 fishing boats remained in Wick. This figure has remained roughly constant since: although several hundred small fishing boats based along the Caithness coast and beyond still carry the "WK" Wick fishing registration code letters.

From the 1970s the gap left in the local economy since the departure of the herring was partially filled by the discovery of North Sea Oil. Wick has since been used as convenient base for offshore supply vessels. The traffic this generated has also helped the development of Wick Airport, using a Second World War airfield on the low plateau immediately to the north of the town.

Today's Wick is an interesting mix of influences and elements. The harbour remains both active and interesting, while the town centre has considerable character without being either fossilised or run down. In Pulteneytown you find the Wick Heritage Centre, giving Summer visitors a feel for the town's herring years, and here, too, you find the Pulteney Distillery.