Scottish east coast fishery
Open-knowledge reference entry
The Scottish east coast fishery has been in existence for more than a thousand years, spanning the Viking Age right up to the present day.
A brief history
The fishery has always been for both whitefish and herring. The Norsemen came to Scotland from the 9th to 11th centuries and settled in the Northern Isles, Western Isles and on the mainland. They had fish as a large part of their diet, and excavations of Viking sites in Orkney and Shetland have found middens (kitchen waste areas) containing large quantities of fish bones. These bones were mainly of cod, saithe and ling but herring, haddock and whiting bones were also found. They used the line fishing method with hooks and bait.
The Dutch had a near monopoly of the herring fishing from the 15th to the 17th centuries. The boats, called busses, were very large. They lay overnight with the drift nets set to catch the herring and were hauled by hand in the morning. The herring were salted and placed in barrels.
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This entry incorporates text from “Scottish east coast fishery” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.