Silver darlings

Gilly Pickup goes in search of Wine Drinkers* and Glasgow Magistrates*.

Buy my *caller (fresh) herrin' they're bonnie fish and dainty fairin'/ Wha'll buy my caller herrin/ New drawn frae the Forth.' It was an old cry, familiar for centuries in the streets of Edinburgh. It was not only concerning herring though. Around 160 species of fish swim in Scotland's seas, rivers and lochs.

However, most popular is the herring, immortalised by the author Neil Gunn as the ‘Silver Darlings'. This Piscean king is the fish of legend and song and regarded since the middle ages as a source of employment and wealth. Scotland exported vast numbers of salted herring to the Baltic countries and prior to the First World War, was a major exporter of herrings to Russia.

In the 14th century, King David II was the first to impose an export duty on this migratory fish and there is a saying that Amsterdam is founded on the bones of Scottish herring.

Silver-bellied herring with their forked tails and blue-green backs swim in shoals near the water's surface. As spawning approaches, the fish gather in larger shoals and spawn in shallow bays, depositing their eggs – at least 10,000 per herring – on the seabed.

In the herring season, islanders, particularly from Lewis, took the ferry to the mainland en route mainly for Wick, a foot blistering, week long walk. There, men worked on the herring boats while women cured the fish. Living conditions were dreadful. People slept in insanitary bothies, 12 or 15 to a room. The stench in the streets, described as ‘putrescent eff...

To read the rest of this article you can do any of the following.

• By : Gilly Pickup
• In : Scotland History
• Issue : 51
• Page : 60
• Words : 764