Findochty

Landscape and setting

Findochty is gathered around a two-basin harbour at the foot of a steep coastal slope. The rugged grassed shoreline, narrow routes and rising ground give close relationships between buildings, sea views and working harbour space.

How Findochty developed

The Ogilvys held the lands in the sixteenth century before the Ord family acquired the castle, fisher lands and port. Fishermen brought from Fraserburgh in 1716 expanded herring and white-fish activity. An organic seatown grew around the harbour, followed by planned streets and increasingly elaborate Victorian houses; Buckie Harbour’s expansion reduced Findochty’s fishing role after the 1890s.

Architecture and archaeology

The launch group ranges from the ruined Castle of Findochty and a nearby pantiled cottage to the 1863 church, a K6 kiosk, early cottages and later houses with gabled dormers, painted dressings, traditional glazing, garden walls and carved or ball-finialled details.

Explore responsibly

Use public streets and harbour routes while respecting working areas, traffic and private homes. Do not enter the castle, cottage ground, gardens or church without permission or confirmed opening, and never climb on ruined masonry.

Context sources

Heritage records

Explore Findochty 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

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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.

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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.

1 New Street

A cottage dated 1843 was later raised and its small adjoining store absorbed into a taller, more elaborate New Street house.

12–14 South Blantyre Street

Two closely matched houses step with the slope, using repeated dormers and painted joints to turn level change into a coherent street group.

3–4 Church Street

Two matching houses create a six-dormer rhythm on Church Street, demonstrating how repeated details shaped Findochty’s later planned townscape.

4 Chapel Street

Painted long-and-short dressings and twelve-pane windows give this low Chapel Street cottage a precise, decorative face.

Castle of Findochty

An eight-metre-high fragment of a sixteenth-century tower house preserves a vaulted undercroft, stair tower and traces of its former court.

Findochty Castle Cottage

A whitewashed pantiled cottage may embody nineteenth-century reuse of rubble taken from the neighbouring Castle of Findochty.

Findochty Church of Scotland

A pointed doorway, Y-traceried windows and granite bellcote give this simple 1863 church a commanding presence above Findochty harbour.

Findochty K6 Telephone Kiosk

A standard red K6 kiosk brings Giles Gilbert Scott’s nationally familiar 1935 communications design into Findochty’s harbour streetscape.

Firth View

A gabled central bay, painted masonry dressings and ball-finialled gates express the growing confidence of Findochty’s houses around 1900.

Westfield

Three ball-finialled gables and a dated 1904 front show the ornate end of Findochty’s progression from low fishing cottages to larger houses.