Burghead

Landscape and setting

Burghead occupies a prominent headland on the Moray Firth. The harbour lies below Granary Street and the surviving earthworks of a major early historic fort, giving the compact planned town an unusually close relationship between archaeology, industry and sea.

How Burghead developed

The Pictish fortress and possible early Christian centre long predate the planned town and harbour created from 1805. Grain export, fishing, coastguard work and maritime warning systems then shaped the warehouses, pier and headland structures that survive today.

Architecture and archaeology

The launch group includes the fort, graveyard and Clavie site, Burghead Well, Telford’s north pier, four granary buildings, the Masonic Hall, former coastguard complex and a rare storm signal later adapted with a wartime lookout.

Explore responsibly

Use public streets and official visitor information. The harbour is operational, homes and halls have their own access arrangements, exposed headland edges require care, and archaeological earthworks, memorials and the Clavie Stone must not be disturbed.

Context sources

Heritage records

Explore Burghead on the map

Every teal SA marker is a reviewed Scotland’s Architecture record. A small A, B, C or SM badge records its designation without turning it into a live HES marker. Optional map layers add separate official HES listed buildings and scheduled monuments, nearby Wikipedia articles, NLS historical mapping, walking notes and device location. Nearby SA markers are grouped at wider views. Skip the map and browse the A–Z record list.

Marker key: reviewed Scotland’s Architecture record small badge = designationHES, SM and W markers belong to the optional live layers
Map layers:SA records: 10HES listed: offScheduled monuments: offWikipedia: off

Use the + and − controls at the map’s upper-left to change scale. They work with both the modern and historical maps.

Showing 10 mapped records. Locations are approximate catalogue points.

Map information, accuracy and rights

Locations are approximate catalogue points, not property boundaries or route guidance. Showing your location is optional: the site uses it only in this page and does not save it. Nearby distances are straight-line estimates. Current-use notes do not establish opening, access, ownership or route safety. Modern map tiles are supplied by OpenStreetMap. The optional historical overlay is the Ordnance Survey six-inch first edition for Scotland, principally surveyed in the 1840s–1880s, supplied by the National Library of Scotland. Sheet dates and coverage vary, and the historical map must not be read as current geography.

Marker links open the exact coordinates in Google Maps satellite view; they do not automatically select a panorama and do not require a paid Street View integration. On desktop, drag Pegman onto a blue road. On mobile, turn on the Street View layer and tap a blue road. Other photo markers may be user-contributed. The optional listed-buildings layer appears from city and large-town scale (zoom 12), clusters nearby designations, and links to official HES records. Lettered markers show the authoritative HES listing categories A, B and C. The separate scheduled-monuments layer appears from regional scale (zoom 10), uses purple SM markers at approximate designation centres, and links to official HES records for the full statutory boundary. It is independent of the listed-building category filter. Purple SM markers already attached to Scotland’s Architecture records remain curated catalogue markers. The separate, opt-in Wikipedia layer shows geotagged English Wikipedia articles in the current close map view. W markers are supplied independently by Wikipedia, may cover subjects beyond architecture, and are not affected by HES filters. Turning it on sends the visible map centre and approximate radius to Wikimedia; Scotland’s Architecture does not save that request. Plan a heritage walk loads a Place-wide inventory independently of the current zoom, suggests a Category A-led order of principal stops, and divides longer itineraries into Google Maps legs. It uses no paid Google integration and does not reproduce Google route geometry. The site map deliberately shows numbered stops without a connecting line; Google supplies the live pedestrian streets, paths, distance and time. Optional Category B and C candidates are selected only by proximity to a principal landmark marker and are not assumed to lie on Google’s route. Printable notes retain complete active URLs. This is a discovery aid rather than a statutory property-boundary search. For additional historic-map comparison and wider archaeological layers, visit PastMap; check current designation status and full legal extent in the linked official HES record.

Historical map: Ordnance Survey six-inch first edition, Scotland, 1843–1882, National Library of Scotland, licensed under CC BY 4.0. Listed-building and scheduled-monument data contains Historic Environment Scotland and OS data © Historic Environment Scotland and Crown Copyright and database right 2026, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Wikipedia article titles, coordinates and links are supplied by Wikipedia contributors.

57 Granary Street

Loading doors, shutters and a rear forestair make this early warehouse a particularly readable survival of Burghead’s planned grain port.

Burghead Harbour North Pier

Telford’s massive north pier gave the planned town its working harbour edge and was repeatedly extended as Burghead’s trade changed.

Burghead Masonic Hall

A restrained five-bay hall brings civic and associational architecture into Burghead’s predominantly industrial Granary Street.

Burghead Storm Signal

A circular storm-signal platform later gained a wartime lookout, layering two systems of coastal surveillance on the Pictish headland.

Burghead Well

Steps descend six metres into a rock-cut chamber whose purpose—water supply, shrine, baptistry or something else—remains one of Burghead’s central mysteries.

Granary House

This broad four-storey former warehouse rises above North Quay as a conspicuous reminder of Burghead’s grain and herring economy.

Station Road Granary

A and W Reid’s symmetrical 1865 granary extends Burghead’s grain landscape beyond the earliest harbour-side warehouses.

Telford House

Built into the headland above the harbour, this tall former warehouse embodies Burghead’s early nineteenth-century grain-export economy.