Crail Kirk
Crail Cross
Crail Tolbooth
Auld Hoose
Crail Doocot
Castle Street
Ship Carving
Crail Harbour
House by the
Harbour
Road to the
Harbour
Worn steps up
to Cottage
Crail Mercat Cross
St Andrews Road
High Street

Photos of Recent visit to Crail Pottery

Visit Crail

Crail, in The Kingdom of Fife, is a very popular East Neuk village adored by both artists and photographers. The picture of Crail harbor with its little houses, white walls, crowstepped gables and red pantile roofs, features on the front of numerous brochures and many calendars. Yet there is much more to Crail than the pretty harbor which was the lifeline for one of Scotland's most prosperous burghs in medieval times. ( Map of this area )

Crail is the oldest East Neuk Burgh, and became a Royal Burgh in the 12th century. In 1310 Robert the Bruce granted permission for Crail to hold markets on Sunday - always a contentious point with the Reformers. The markets, which were once among the largest in Europe, were held in the Marketgait where the 17th century Mercat Cross stands. Crail Photo Album

The distinctive squat tower of the Tolbooth with its rare Dutch type roof has a fish as a weathervane. This is an old reminder of the days when the Crail Capon - a split and dried haddock - was a famous delicacy associated with Crail. The Tolbooth dates from the 16th century and used to house the old Council Chamber, Courtroom and prison. Also in Marketgait is Crail Parish Church on a site where there has been a church since the 12th century.

Crail has many old houses and cottages and is best explored on foot to capture the quiet atmosphere of a Scottish village. The dominant building around the harbor is the large, white, crowstepped, Customs House, built in 1690. East of Crail is the Balcomie Links of the Crail Golfing Society which is the seventh oldest golf club in the world. Visitors are always welcome to enjoy the bracing air of Fife Ness while out on a round of golf.

The Most Easterly Port

Crail is the most easterly of the Fife ports, the last tassel in the golden fringe of the grey mantle. It is proud of being the oldest of the five royal burghs in the East Neuk, and it received royal recognition long before any of the other burghs along the coast. The spacious Marketgate, the Cross with its unicorn, the gates opening grandly on the churchyard, the fine old house-all these things seem part of a conscious display of the dignity attaching to Crail's unique position in the Kingdom.

The Town House is famous for its lovely Dutch tower. That tower is the first thing we notice as we enter Marketgate. Notice the weathercock. No chanticleer for this town of the sea. The direction of the wind is pointed by a fish. And appropriate enough this is for Crail, the town which gave its own name to the sun-dried haddocks upon which it built its commercial wealth. "Crail capons" they were known as throughout the country.

On the north wall of the Town House we see Crail's carved coat-of-arms, which although not the registered coat-of-arms of the burgh is happily characteristic of the town. It shows, with the date 1602, an open one-sailed boat and four sailors. The bell in the quaint canopied belfry of the tower rings regularly at ten o'clock every night. On evenings when the red lamps (locally known as "The Meads") are burning to guide the ships between the harbour wall and the dangerous Skellies, the tolling of the bell from the high Dutch tower recalls some of the romance and adventure of this port.

Few towns as small as Crail have so noble a centre as that wide, tree-lined Marketgate. It was Robert the Bruce who gave Crail permission to hold a free market on the Sabbath. For more than 200 years it was held every Sunday, and it took the Reformers almost thirty years to stamp out finally this Sunday-market custom. Side by side with the produce of the Kingdom were offered in Marketgate strange wares from distant lands, for the Crail of those days was a famous port for foreign traders.

The Town House is neighboured by a number of goodly-looking houses. Near the entrance to the church is the mansion of Kirkmay, once the home of the Inglis family. To the west of it is a handsome row of old houses. The date 1686 is engraved over the doorway of the one known as "Ye Aulde House". In Marketgate, and at other corners, are the crow-stepped gables of many fine antique residences, and each wynd and street has some relic of ancient days.

Of the royal residence of Crail Castle there is but a scrap remaining above the harbour, but the mill close to the ruin is still known as the King's Mill. Castle Walk is a traditional promenade for the fishermen, who are said to pace that pathway as they would pace their deck, five paces forward and then a turn.

In a wall on the south side of Nethergate can be seen the arch of an ancient nunnery, and near the shore is its strange bottle-shaped doocot. In the Victoria Gardens is a most ancient relic, a sculptured cross of the 11th century or earlier, known as the Sauchope Stone because it once stood on an earthen mound on the farm of Sauchope.

Ancient Crosses

The church was consecrated by Bishop David de Bernham in 1243, and on the east and north walls are fragments of the consecration crosses which have been built into the walls during alterations. One of the crosses in its original position can be seen on the west gable of the south aisle-close to the window. By 1517 the church ofCrail, raised to the dignity of a collegiate church, had nine altars, and the church was thus second only to a cathedral. Here on 3rd June, 1559, Knox announced his plan to preach again at St Andrews on the fol-lowing day, and his hearers pulled down the altars and images. A century later James Sharp was minister of this church.

When juggling Sharp his calling first began,
To cheat the church with hocus tricks,
he ran To Crail by sea, a flock as he could wish.
Them he did feed with wind-they him with fish.

Inside the church, placed against the west wall of the lobby, is a sculptured cross of great age, judged by experts to belong to any period from 800 to 1150.

The churchyard at Crail has been most justly if jocularly described as the "Westminster Abbey of Crail". Perhaps no other churchyard of its size is so rich in elaborately carved memorial stones. One of the most striking is the one in which stands, now much damaged, an armoured figure. It has been established as the tomb of William Bruce of Symbister, who died in 1630. Nearby, on the south wall, is a memorial to the Reverend Alexander Leslie-the same Leslie who on the morning of 3rd May, 1679, entertained a visitor in his manse at Ceres. The visitor was that same James Sharp who had once been minister at Crail but was now Archbishop of St Andrews. Archbishop Sharp stayed to smoke a pipe and chat and then resumed the journey that was to end with his murder on Magus Muir. There are many other tombs, a most imposing array of them along the west wall, elaborately carved with arms, skulls, spades, bones, crossed bones, hour-glasses. In the north-west corner is the elegant one to the memory of James Lumsden of Airdrie. Nearby Airdrie Castle was one of the great Houses of Fife, a popular place of call for royal hunters when the court was at Crail.

The mortuary near the north wall was "erected for securing the dead" in 1826. Here, to foil the body-snatchers, corpses were kept some months before being committed to their graves. The large blue stone not far from the gates of the church was thrown at the church from the Isle of May by the Devil. Those who doubt the story are shown the impress of the Devil's thumb on the surface of it.

The Tip of the Kingdom

Having come to the most easterly burgh of the Kingdom, we cannot turn away without passing to the most easterly point. The walk from Crail to Fife Ness takes us along the cliffs with magnificent views of Roome Bay. It is here that we realise with almost startling suddenness all that it means to be on the most easterly hem of the golden fringe. The view fans out into a magnificent prospect of cliff and sea, with the Isle of May lying statuesque to the south.

We cross a rocky escarpment which is known as Danes Dyke, by reason of its supposed use by the Danes as a line of defence. Those who argued that it was but a natural ridge of rock were refuted when a portion of it was opened up and revealed human bones and "none but broken and carried stones".

On the shore is Constantine's Cave, where, tradition has it, King Constantine was put to death by the Danes in 874. From Danes Dyke we have a striking view of the eastern point of the Kingdom, Fifeness Point. Here on a June evening in 1538 Mary of Guise was welcomed by the laird of nearby Balcomie Castle when she landed in Scotland on her way to her wedding at St Andrews.

Upon those jutting rocks we are at the tip of our Kingdom, with the sea ahead and around us. Off the headland we can see the light-ship, the North Carr, marking a deadly sunken reef, the Carr Rock, and far distant, never on even the clearest day more than a thin pencil of white on the skyline, the noblest lighthouse of all, the light-' house of the Bell Rock. The Bell Rock or Inchcape rock-a red sandstone ridge, 2,000 feet long-lies in the direct track of ships entering the Firths of Tay and Forth, and before the lighthouse was built was said to be the most dangerous reef on the east coast of Scotland. The noble lighthouse is 120 feet high. There are few people to whom its name will not recall a line or two of Southey's ballad which tells how Sir Ralph the Rover cut away the warning bell placed upon the rock by the Abbot of Aberbrothock and a year later was driven on to the rock himself and perished.

To the north of Crail lies the attractive coastal village of Kingsbarns so named because the King's grain was stored in the large barns before being transported to the Crail or Falkland. The first church in Kingsbarns was built in 1631.

If you would like to visit this area as part of a highly personalized small group tour of my native Scotland please e-mail me:

Return to sample itinerary