Wick, Caithness
Wick is a town and royal burgh in Caithness, in the far north of Scotland. The town straddles the River Wick and extends along both sides of Wick Bay. "Wick Locality" had a population of 6,954 at the time of the 2011 census, a decrease of 3.8% from 2001.
Pulteneytown, which was developed on the south side of the river by the British Fisheries Society during the 19th century, was officially merged into the burgh in 1902.
Elzy was described as on the coast a couple of miles east of Wick in 1836.
The town is on the main road linking John o' Groats with southern Britain. The Far North railway line links Wick railway station with southern Scotland and with Thurso, the other burgh of Caithness. Wick Airport is on Wick's northern outskirts and serves as a base for private helicopter flights to offshore wind and oil projects, as well as scheduled commercial flights to Aberdeen.
The main offices of The John O'Groat Journal and The Caithness Courier are located in Wick, as are Caithness General Hospital, the Wick Carnegie Library and local offices of the Highland Council. Wick Sheriff Court is one of 16 sheriff courts serving the sheriffdom of Grampian, Highland and Islands.
History
Pre-Christian Wick
activity in the parish of Wick is evident in the hill fort at Garrywhin. Evidence of activity around Wick from the Norse pagan period was discovered in 1837 when brooches and bracelets from the Norse were uncovered by archaeologists. The name Wick appears to be from a Norse word, vík, meaning bay, cf. also the word viking.Conversion to Christianity
In the eighth century, Saint Fergus, an Irish missionary, lived in Wick or its immediate vicinity during his mission to the people in the area. He is the patron saint of Wick. One of the fairs in Wick, the Fergusmas, is named after this saint. It is believed that the Chapel of St. Tear in Wick Parish near Ackergill was founded in the eighth century by St Drostan, whose ministry was in Aberdeenshire.12th and 13th centuries
Wick belonged to Norway, as did all of Caithness, until the reign of William the Lion, at which time the Norwegian earls held of the king of Scotland.The Castle of Old Wick, commonly known as "The Old Man of Wick" is thought to have been built in about 1160 by Harald Maddadson, Earl of Caithness and Orkney. Earl Harald, who was half Norse, is thought to have resided there. It was long used by fishermen as an aid to navigation in the North Sea.
The Origines Parochiales Scotiae records these events for twelfth-century Wick:
Between the years 1142 and 1149 Rognvald Earl of Orkney went into Katanes and was there entertained at Vik by a husbandman named Sveinn the son of Hroald, a very brave man. When Sveinn Asleifson was in the Hebrides, he committed the keeping of Dungulsbae, which he had received from Earl Rognvald, to Margad Grimson, whose oppressions caused many to take refuge with Hroald in Wik. This occasioned a dispute between Hroald and Margad, and the latter soon afterwards went to Wik with nineteen men and slew Hroald. Between the years 1153 and 1156, Harald Maddadson, then joint Earl Katanes and Orkney with Earl Rognvald, passed into Katanes and wintered at Wik.
14th and 15th centuries
In about 1330, the parish of Wick was included among the Caithness lands owned by the family of Cheyne. The last male heir, Sir Reginald de Cheyne, died and was succeeded by his two daughters, who, by marriage, carried the lands into the clans Sinclair, Sutherland, and Keith.Between 1390 and 1406, King Robert III granted the town of Wick in heritage to Neill Sutherland with a burgh of barony.
In 1438, the clans Gunn and Keith joined battle near Wick on the moor of Tannach with both sides suffering heavy losses. However, hostilities between the two clans were not ended at that time.
16th century
In 1503, the Parliament of Scotland established a sheriff for Caithness, who "should sit and have a place for administration of his office within the town of Wick".In 1538, Ackergill Tower, north of Wick, was granted to William Keith, 4th Earl Marischal and Lady Margaret Keith, his wife. Nine years later, George, Earl of Caithness, and others seized the tower house, taking hostage Alexander Keith, captain of the castle, and John Scarlet, his servitor, who were imprisoned in Girnigoe, Braal Castle, and other places. They were charged with treason but were granted remission by Queen Mary.
In 1583, when George Sinclair, 4th Earl of Caithness, died at Edinburgh, his heart was brought to Wick where it was encased in lead and placed in Sinclair's aisle at the church of Wick. However, it entered the story of Wick once again in 1588 when Wick suffered at the hands of Alexander Gordon, 12th Earl of Sutherland, in his campaign against the 5th Sinclair Earl of Caithness, who had killed his kinsman. While Sinclair and his men concealed themselves in Girnigoe Castle nearby, Sutherland proceeded to burn the town of Wick, "an achievement of no great difficulty, as the place at that time merely consisted of a few mean straggling houses thatched with straw". All structures in the town except the church were burned. During the chaos of the fire, a Highlander intent on plundering the church broke open the lead case which contained the heart of the late Earl of Caithness, and, disappointed that no treasure was in the casque, flung the heart into the wind.
In 1589, James VI made the town into a royal burgh in favour of the fifth Earl of Caithness.
17th century
Wick did not escape the turbulence of the Reformation period when, in 1613, the Anglican archdeacon Richard Merchiston of Bower, a graduate of the University of Edinburgh, was brought into Caithness by Bishop Patrick Forbes. Merchiston, a zealous iconoclast, angered the Catholic townspeople when he broke up the stone sculpture of St. Fergus, the town's patron saint. At first yielding to the city authorities who tried to prevent violence, a band of men nevertheless followed the parson as he returned home in the evening, took him by force, and drowned him in the Wick River. When questioned about the murder, they alleged that it had been the work of the saint himself, whom they claimed they had seen astride Merchiston, holding his head below the water.In 1680, the last clan battle in Scotland took place west of Wick at Altimarlach, involving a dispute between Campbell of Glenorcy and the Sinclairs over the earldom of Caithness. The Sinclairs headquartered in Wick, where they became the victims of a cunning stratagem by an agent of Glenorchy, who ordered that a ship loaded with whisky, "the nectar of Caithness", come to ground nearby, presuming the Sinclairs would imbibe the drink in quantity. He was not wrong. The next morning, weakened by their revels of the night before, the Sinclairs marched out to meet the Campbells and were ambushed at Altimarlach. Nearly all the Sinclairs were driven into the river and drowned.
18th century
In the eighteenth century, the people of Wick were Gaelic-speakers, but according to a presbytery report of 1707, they could understand English.When Robert Forbes, appointed episcopal Bishop of Caithness in 1762, arrived in the county, he discovered there was no minister at Wick, but he is known to have held services and performed confirmations at the "house of Mr. Campbell" there.
In the year of his arrival, Bishop Forbes reported that every year on the morning of the Feast of Innocents Day, the people of Wick and its environs would gather for prayer at the ruins of the Chapel of St. Tear near Noss Head. In ruins at the time, the chapel had originally been made of stone and mortar without any lime, leaving little gaps in the wall into which people would press offerings of bread, cheese, and money. He left this description of the event:
In the afternoon, they get music—a piper and fiddler—and dance on the green where the chapel stands. The roof is off, but the walls are almost entire. One of the late Presbyterian preachers of Wick thought to have abolished this old practice; and for that end appointed a Diet of catechising in that corner of the parish upon the day of the Holy Innocents, but not one attended him; all went, as usual, to St. Tear’s Chapel. I saw the font-stone for baptism lying on the green at the east end of the chapel. Mr. Sutherland, of Wester, observed that no doubt it has been called the Chapel of St. Tear from the tears of the parents and other relations of the murdered innocents.
The Rev. Charles Thomson, a nineteenth-century minister of the Free Church of Wick, stated in the New Statistical Account of Scotland that, though the bread and cheese were intended for the souls of the slain children, a dog-keeper in the neighbourhood would take the food out and feed it to the hounds.
19th century
In the late eighteenth century, the British Fishery Society had established fishing ports at Tobermory and Ullapool, but when shoals of herring normally plentiful in the area moved away from the west coast, authorities turned toward Wick as a good prospect for the herring industry. Construction of Wick Harbour began in 1803 and was completed by 1811. It soon became a bustling harbour with ships from the Isles, the coast of Scotland, Wales, Shetland, and the Isle of Man. With the rise in fisheries, the size of the town increased, and Wick replaced Thurso as the centre of both shipping and trade in Caithness.In 1800 a bridge was built at Wick, before which travellers from the south could only cross over into Wick via a footbridge of eleven pillars connected by planks. In 1803 the Highland Roads Act allowed that the "Parliamentary" road which ran from Inverness to Thurso be extended from the Ord to Wick and then to Thurso, construction of which was completed in 1811. In 1818, the mail coach, which was already running between Inverness and Tain, extended its reach by passing Bonar Bridge and the Ord to Wick and Thurso, which offered better communication between Wick and the south of Scotland.
In 1806, Wick Baptist Church was founded, first meeting in a small loft in Kirk Lane, and later moving into a newly built Church in Union Street in 1865. Wick Town Hall was completed in 1828.
Pulteneytown was founded in 1808 to provide space for the many Scots displaced by the Highland Clearances, who poured to the coast in search of work in the fishing industry. By the 1840s it was reported there were over 1,000 herring boats in the harbour alongside a large curing industry which had been developed around the harbour.
The Roman Catholic Church of St Joachim was consecrated in 1836, being the first Catholic church in Caithness since the Reformation, initially serving seasonal Irish labourers working in the herring industry. It was built on land given to Walter Lovi in gratitude for his ministry to the community during an epidemic of cholera.
Two newspapers were established in Wick in the nineteenth century: the John o' Groat Journal in 1836 and the Northern Ensign in 1850, both of which are said to have espoused Liberal views in politics.
Navigation was an ongoing challenge for vessels in the bay of Wick. In 1804 the Two Brothers schooner from Sunderland was wrecked in the bay with the loss of all crew and passengers. In April 1836 the brig Lalla Rookh was driven onto rocks at Elzy, described as a few miles east of Wick, on her way from Newcastle upon Tyne to Quebec in ballast under the command of Captain Green, during a severe easterly gale.
The population in 1841 was 1,333.
In 1868, Robert Louis Stevenson stayed in Wick while his uncle, Alan Stevenson, a lighthouse engineer, was overseeing the construction of the nearby Noss Head Lighthouse, which opened in 1869. Stevenson was later to write about Wick.