Tall Ships, Big Boats
The Tall Ships Race arrives in Aberdeen from 19-23 July 2025 for five days of nautical themed activities and events, with over 50 ships, yachts and boats of various length and beam moored in the harbour. It is a great honour for the City and to mark the occasion the Art Gallery is putting on a special exhibition of historic photos from the Aberdeen Harbour Board archive that date from around 1890 to the 1920’s. But the history of the harbour goes back much further than that, almost 900 years to 1136 when David I granted a charter establishing trading rights for the Burgh.
The harbour today is unrecognisable from that early natural shelter at the mouth of the Denburn, where small boats would be pulled up on to the shelving beach. Back then, the River Dee spread out into shallow, sandy flats, covered at high tide but partly exposed as it ebbed. These exposed parts were known as Inches, from the Gaelic word meaning island. The first record of a man-made quay dates from 1399 but there was certainly one there before that. This would have been along the line of Trinity Quay and built of wood. At some stage, the wooden jetty was replaced by a stone and clay construction. Various improvements and repairs were made throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries including a set of stairs added to the quay to facilitate loading/unloading and the first crane, erected in 1582, to reduce manual shifting and lifting of cargoes.
The first structure that changed the course of the river Dee was the construction, completed in 1659, of a major wharf stretching east along the shorelands to what is now Commerce Street, more or less following the line of the current Regent quay. This enabled the deepening of the water in the tidal estuary and reclaimed the ground between the new quay and Virginia Street. Prior to that the high tide would have lapped the bottom of the pathway leading up Shiprow to the Castlegate. Despite this improvement, access to the harbour was subject to the vagaries of the sand, silt and shingle carried by river and tide, exacerbated by the dumping of stone ballast until the town council banned the practise. Consequently, larger vessels had to lay up in the River Dee opposite Torry, or tie up at Futty, the ancient fishing village that predated Footdee and where Pocra Quay is today.
The major turning point in the harbour’s fortunes occurred in 1770 when John Smeaton, renowned civil engineer of Eddystone lighthouse fame, submitted his report recommending a pier at the north side of the harbour entrance to improve the river flow and prevent the formation of sand bars that regularly blocked the harbour entrance. Built in 1773 and extended in 1812, the first 1200ft of the present North Pier is his original structure, still standing 250 years later.
The first half of the nineteenth century saw the greatest improvements and enlargement of the harbour from which emerged the basic outline that we have today. The catalyst was Thomas Telford’s report of 1809, which proposed construction of an enclosed dock (later the Upper and Victoria docks), access locks to maintain the water level at low tide, graving (dry) docks for ship building and repairs and redirecting the River Dee to a southern channel. A breakwater was also constructed on the south side of the river to reduce the impact of easterly swells rolling up the tidal basin.
Progress continued in the second half of the nineteenth century. This included four new quays, Blaikes and Commerce; and Albert and Mearns, built with water deep enough to keep ships afloat even at low tide. In the 1870s the River Dee was finally constrained to the southern edge of the former Inches and a new, longer, South breakwater constructed between 1869 and 1874. The outline of the harbour as we see today was almost complete.
Limited changes were possible during WWI and despite being regularly targeted by the Luftwaffe during WWII, Aberdeen harbour was left relatively unscathed. Improvements continued in logical steps – installing new cranes, improving quays and replacing the Upper dock lock gates in 1953 with a new bascule lifting bridge. One slightly over-ambitious plan that never came to pass was a proposal for a huge new dock south of Queen’s Links, sandwiched between York street and the Beach Esplanade. Access would have been via a channel where Dales Marine yard is today, and would have completely cut off Footdee.
As with much else in Aberdeen, the next major stage in development occurred with the arrival of the oil industry. When the first discoveries were made in the early 1970’s, most traffic was handled in Victoria and Upper Docks to which access was only possible a few hours either side of high tide. Time and tide may not wait for man, but from the outset the oil companies were not prepared to wait for the tide and demanded a 24/7 access, 365 days of the year. Consequently, the lock gates and bascule bridge had to go and the quaysides were heavily reinforced to withstand the hydrostatic pressures induced by the rising and falling tide.
Today the Port of Aberdeen, as it is now styled since the opening of the South Harbour in 2022, continues to thrive, managing 7000 vessel movements a year and over 3 million tonnes of freight to and from 36 countries. As the oil industry continues its inevitable decline, new uses like cruise ships, harbour tours and the Tall Ships continue the tradition of Aberdeen as a maritime hub, hopefully for many more years to come.
