Buckie - Buckie As A Port

Buckie As A Port

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 D.&T. Stevenson of Edinburgh, the family firm 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 quartzite harbour walls remain completely intact.