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Boat
Wynd
In my young days Boat
Wynd was a busy place. Boat
Wynd is the piece of ground that's
between the gables of the houses, Carrick
House and Catherine Bank at the very west end of the
Earlsferry beach.
In my time, attached to Boat
Wynd was a stone slipway very
similar to the slipway that's at the west end of South Street in
Elie except that it was an extension
of Boat Wynd and went straight south into the sea. Like the
Earlsferry harbour that up
until 1776 existed somewhere close to the Boat Wynd
slipway, the stonework of the
Earlsferry
slipway also succumbed to the pounding of the winter
south easterly gale force
waves that drive in from the North Sea.
Nothing now remains of the
Earlsferry
harbour or the Boat Wynd slipway. History books of The East
Neuk of Fife make mention of the
Earlsferry
harbour in connection with The Chapel hospice and the sea
crossing passageway from Earlsferry
to the south side of the Firth of Forth. The vessel that
spirited Macduff, the Earl of Fife,
to the safety of the south shore most likely set sail from the
Earlsferry
harbour.
No doubt after all of the Earlsferry
fishermen were drowned, apathy as to the harbour, set in and
timely repairs that should have been done weren't to the point
that winter storms became victorious over the hand of man. Or it
could have been that the cost of repairs just overwhelmed the
ability of those who had to pay.
In my early
Earlsferry years the small fishing boats that
Earlsferry men owned numbered about
ten. Most were clinker built row boats of about twelve or
fourteen feet in length. During the summer most were kept moored
between the Cockstail Rocks at the
end of The Cadger's Road and a few found summer anchorage near
the black wall at the end of the beach.
Usually about the end of September as
the halcyon days of summer were dwindling to a close all of the
Earlsferry boats were hauled up the
slipway by means of ropes, wooden rollers and the brawn of the
boat owners to spend the winter in the safety of Boat
Wynd. I remember one enterprising
man who borrowed one of the Clydesdales from one of the local
farmers to provide the
hauling-out horse power for his boat. During the winter and the
following spring, Boat Wynd became
the Earlsferry boatyard as the boat
owners worked to repair and paint their boats to get them ready
for the next summer season. A few boats stayed in Boat Wynd all year
round.
I would suspect that when the
Earlsferry fishing industry was in
its heyday and before Carrick House
and Catherine Bank were built that the boatyard, what's now Boat
Wynd, covered a far greater area of
the foreshore.
Just recently, in the interests of
the history of the village of Earlsferry, my Earlsferry friends
Jems, Jimmy Linton and Alberto, Albert Lawrie have been
diligently searching for the
disappeared Earlsferry
harbour and have identified the
location of the old harbour and
have found some of its stonework.
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