Old Photograph Crofters Gathering Seaweed Gruinard Bay Scotland

Old photograph of crofters gathering seaweed on Gruinard Bay twelve miles North of Poolewe in Wester Ross, Scotland. In the late 1600s, a use for seaweed was discovered which was to ultimately provide a major industry for the Western Highlands Coast, Isles and Orkney archipelago. Extraction of soda and potash from seaweed provided a ready supply of these chemicals for the British isles. The practice had been introduced to Scotland in the late seventeenth Century. There are records of its first appearance in Anstruther, Fife, in 1694. By 1722 the practice had spread to Orkney, brought by an Orcadian entrepreneur named James Fea. There was relatively little kelp burning on Isle of Skye, where the first appearance of the industry was as late as 1758, and the more southerly islands, and there was almost no kelp ash industry to speak of in Shetland. Mull did have a modest industry at one time, centred around Loch na Keal.



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