WHERE ARE WE ? / WHO ARE WE ?

On a line of latitude well north of Moscow the Royal Burgh of Wick is approximately 850 miles north of Lands End and 20 South of John O Groats. The town has a population of approximately 8,000 and serves as the county town of Caithness, the most northerly county of the British mainland.

Up until the early 1800s Wick was doubtless a rather insignificant little hamlet until the exploitation of the visiting shoals of Clupea Harengus. It was the catching, gutting, packing and selling to the world of herring that put Wick on the map as the herring capital of Europe.

The harbour at Wick was developed and extended due to the prompting of Sir John Sinclair of Ulbster and the British Fisheries Society by notable engineers such as Thomas Telford, Thomas Stevenson(father of Robert Louis) and the Keiss born James Bremner, who lived most of his life in Pulteneytown. Bremner was famous as a harbour builder and salvager of wrecks most notably the refloating of I K Brunels great iron ship the Great Britain, in 1847.

Pulteneytown was the new town planned by Thomas Telford to the South of Wick river built to house the fishermen and the other tradesmen employed in the fishery. Pulteneytown was to remain a separate entity from its neighbour Wick until 1902 when the two towns finally amalgamated.

At its peak in the 1860s there were over 1,000 vessels fishing out of Wick, with the population trebling during the season and over a million barrels of cured herring being exported to places such as Ireland, The West Indies and Eastern Europe.It is said that in just 2 days 3500 fisher lassies gutted in the region of 50 million herring! It is interesting to note that much to the disgust of the local clergy there were in the region of 50 public houses.

The early years of the twentieth century saw the transformation from sail to steam at a time when the fishing continued to be successful. It was after the First World War that the decline set in with a combination of poor fishing and loss of traditional markets, due to economic upheaval in Europe.

As the years went on more and more boats were going into seine net fishing with the last herring drifter ceasing fishing for herring in 1953.

With the demise of the fishing new industries have supplied employment notably the Dounreay Nuclear Power Station, Caithness Glass, Simrad Osprey, Rockwater and Norfrost, to name a few.

This is obviously just a taster of what Wick is all about and has concentrated on the herring industry which shaped the way that Wick developed. Lets hope in the near future Wick might also become known for its football team!!!