Buckie, a coast town in Rathven parish, Banffshire, at the mouth of a burn of its own name, 7½ miles NE of Fochabers, 10½ of Fochabers station, 1½ ENE of Portgordon, and 12¼ W by S of Portsoy. A bill, now (1881) before Parliament, proposes to form between the two last places, at a cost of £133,512, a branch of the Great North of Scotland, 13¾ miles long, with intermediate stations at Cullen, Portknockie, Findochty, Portessie, and Buckie, and with a tunnel of 1280 yards near Cullen House. The burn divides the town into Nether Buckie to the W, and Easter Buckie to the E, the former dating from about 1650, the latter from 1723; and at the eastern end of Easter Buckie is a handsome square, the New Town. The ` largest purely fishing village in Scotland, ' Buckie has a post office under Fochabers, with money order, savings' bank, insurance, and telegraph departments, branches of the Aberdeen Town and County, North of Scotland, and Union banks, 8 insurance agencies, gas-works, a lifeboat, a public reading-room and library, a network, 3 rope and sail yards, a tobacco factory, 3 oil works, and a large distillery at Inchgower. A fair is held on the Wednesday before the third Tuesday of July old style. An Established church, raised from a chapel of ease to quoad sacra status in 1876, is about to be rebuilt; a Free church, Elizabethan in style, has a fine steeple; All Saints' Episcopal church, erected (1875-76) at a cost of £2000, is a Decorated edifice, with nave, chancel, circular apse, and a spire 96 feet high; a U.P. church was built in 1870, and St Peter's Roman Catholic church in 1857. The public school, erected (1876) at a cost of £3392, is an Early English pile, with square tower 60 feet high; and this, Mrs Gordon of Cluny's female industrial school, and a Roman Catholic school, with respective accommodation for 600,120, and 292 children, had (1879) an average attendance of 366,107, and 196, and grants of £324,16s., £93,12s. 6d., and £184,6s. The present harbour, replacing one of 1857, was constructed of concrete during 1874-80 at a cost of £60,000, defrayed by the late Mr Gordon of Cluny, and, with an area of 9 acres and quayage of nearly half a mile, comprises an outer and an inner basin. The latter, 4 acres in extent, is 10 feet deep at low water, and thus has a greater depth than any harbour to the N of Leith; 40,000 cubic yards of concrete were used in the entire work, for which 115,000 cubic yards of rock had to be excavated, and 15,000 of soft materials. In 1794 Buckie had only 19 sloops and fishing-boats of aggregately 122 tons; in 1881 its fishing-craft number 333, of 3669 tons, employing 1320 men and boys, and valued at £51,321. It also is head of the fishery district from Banff to Findhorn, in which during 1879 there were cured 8207 barrels of white herring (5108 of them shipped to Baltic and North Sea ports), besides 67,882 cod, ling, and hake-taken by 887 boats of 18,808 tons; the persons employed being 3815 fishermen and boys, 18 fishcurers, 35 coopers, and 2597 others, and the total value of boats, nets, and lines being estimated at £147,100. The Jahres-Häringsbericht gives the Buckie herring catch for the four years 1877-80 as 1320, 2975, 3800, and 12,957 crans. Pop. (1794) 703, (1841) 2165, (1861) 2798, (1871) 3803 -1670 in Nether Buckie; (1881) 4268.—Ord. Sur., sh. 95, 1876. See pp. 316-320 of Jas. Brown's Round Table Club (Elgin, 1873).
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