The Bay Elie East Neuk Of Fife Scotland



Tour Scotland 4K travel video of the Bay on visit to Elie in the East Neuk of Fife. Elie grew up around the bay which provides a safe anchorage. It became a Burgh of Barony in 1589 under the Lairds of Ardross. As such Elie was forbidden to engage directly in foreign trade and was dependent on the Laird of Ardross who controlled the Town Council and Court. Elie is part of the Fife Coastal Walking Path. In recent decades, the town has become a very popular destination for wealthy residents of Glasgow and Edinburgh who have purchased house by the beach and sea. The film The Winter Guest, starring Emma Thompson and Phyllida Law, directed by Alan Rickman, was filmed here. From his home in the Fife burgh of Elie, Alexander Gillespie and his wife and business partner Christian Small, planned their trading ventures. Until 1676, Gillespie voyaged throughout Europe in his ship the Anna, to Norway for timber; into the Baltic for iron, flax, hemp, and oaken boards; London, England, and Rotterdam for manufactured goods and luxury items such as furniture, tobacco, garden seeds, and hoods and bells for hawks. The most profitable cargo for Gillespie, but one which involved the greatest risk and outlay, was wine from Bordeaux, which fetched the best price if it could be unloaded at Leith in time for Hogmany. Gillespie’s outward cargoes were mainly coal and salt from the Firth of Forth, though occasionally he carried human cargoes too, such as a contingent of soldiers, which he delivered to Dieppe in 1671. They were probably about to participate in the projected Anglo French invasion of Holland. Gillespie made detailed notes about navigation, information about hazards and havens, landmarks and reefs, depths of water and even the character of the seabed, which he sampled from the tallow filled hollow at the head of a sounding lead. Such knowledge was stock in trade for a Shipmaster, and Gillespie would have added his observations to a much wider body of information passed down to him through the generations. For coasting seafarers such knowledge was more reliable, and much cheaper, than a chart. Shipmasters often drew little pictures of what particular pieces of coast looked like from the sea, marking landmarks such as church towers or windmills. In 1676 Gillespie went to Rotterdam for six months to supervise the building of a new ship, the James. The James was a larger ship than the Anna, carrying up to 120 tons of cargo, and through her Gillespie amassed the fortune which allowed him, in his final years, to become a country gentleman. None of his descendants followed him into sea- faring careers. Although I now live in Perthshire, I was raised in the East Neuk of Fife.

All photographs are copyright of Sandy Stevenson, Tour Scotland, and may not be used without permission.

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