Scotland’s Architecture

Rosehearty

Landscape and setting

Rosehearty gathers around a rocky harbour on an exposed stretch of the Buchan coast. The older streets occupy ground close to the shore, while later housing rises inland and the ruins of Pitsligo Castle form a prominent landmark above the town.

How Rosehearty developed

The harbour supported a busy fishing port in the early nineteenth century, and income from its dues contributed to burgh prosperity. Warehousing, net making, public services and improved housing followed. Surviving burgh records begin in 1811, while the planned relationship between harbour, Union Street and The Square still explains much of the historic centre.

Architecture and archaeology

The launch group links harbour engineering with a former netting factory, two altered early houses, a post office and former hall, a Jubilee fountain and a tower war memorial. The story extends to the old and new Pitsligo churches and the major Forbes courtyard castle nearby.

Explore responsibly

Use public streets, recognised paths and permitted harbour surfaces. Check current information before entering church or civic buildings. Do not enter private homes, roofless structures, enclosed ruins or working areas without permission, and take care beside water and unstable masonry.

Context sources

Heritage records

Explore Rosehearty 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.

2 Well Street

Number 2 retains an early small-scale house within a later two-storey form, its two differently dated gable windows making the heightening legible.

49 Union Street

This broad pair combines regular domestic fronts with warehouse access at the rear, showing how living and commercial storage could share one Union Street property.

Former Post Office and Masonic Hall

A single-storey cottage became a balanced two-storey public-facing building, with an upper Masonic hall once reached by an external stair.

Hill Kirk

A. Marshall Mackenzie’s granite church was designed around an exceptional survival: the richly carved Forbes family loft moved from the old parish kirk.

Old Pitsligo Church and Burial Ground

This early post-Reformation kirk preserves a T-plan worship space, ornate bellcote and memorial landscape from the creation of Pitsligo parish in the 1630s.

Pitsligo Castle

Pitsligo developed from a fifteenth-century keep into a large courtyard residence, with monumental stairs, drum tower, garden walls and a spring-rich woodland enclosure.

Rosehearty Harbour

A curved pier and a longer projecting arm enclose a compact triangular harbour whose depth helped Rosehearty prosper on an exposed coast.

Rosehearty Jubilee Fountain

Grey, cream and red granites form a compact fountain commemorating Queen Victoria’s sixty-year reign at the meeting of The Square and Union Street.

Rosehearty War Memorial

Rosehearty’s memorial takes the form of a granite tower intended to serve both remembrance and maritime landmark on the rise above the town.

The Jam and Old Netting Factory

Two contrasting remains meet at this corner: the roofless walls of a large eighteenth-century house and a tall warehouse later adapted for making fishing nets.

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