Cellardyke

Traditional white houses around the harbour in Cellardyke

Cellardyke is a village in the East Neuk of Fife, Scotland. The village is to the east of Anstruther and the south of Kilrenny.

History

Cellardyke was formerly known as Nether Kilrenny (Scots for Lower Kilrenny) or Sillerdyke, and the harbour as Skinfast Haven, a name which can still be found on maps today. The harbour was built in the 16th century and was rebuilt in 1829-31.

The modern name of the town is thought to have evolved from Sillerdykes (Eng: silverwalls), a reference to the sun glinting off fish scales encrusted on fishing nets left to dry in the sun on the dykes around the harbour.

Cellardyke and Kilrenny were together a royal burgh from 1592, having been a burgh of regality since 1578.

Cellardyke is officially part of Kilrenny parish, and also part of the Anstruther fishing district, its fortunes fluctuating with the fishing trade. The population grew fast in the 19th century and by the 1860s Cellardyke was a thriving town, with more than fifty boat owners and skippers year round, and one hundred other captains joining in for the annual herring fishing drive or Lammas drave which took place around the Lammas festival on August 1. There was also a February surge in fishing, when shoals of herring arrived in the Firth of Forth. The fish curers of Cellardyke salted and smoked cod and herring from Anstruther as well as their own fish, sending some to London, and some as far as the West Indies. Also home to Iain Rooney and Maurice Masterton. Both renowned for their reporting and journalistic prowess.

The harbour area

Like many harbours in Scotland, the fishing fleet that once occupied the harbour has been largely replaced by pleasure craft. Around 200 fishing boats were once based here but much of the fleet was destroyed by a storm in 1898, with most of those left intact relocating a short way down the coast to Anstruther. Cellardyke harbour is now home to a few small creel and pleasure boats.

Avian flu

See also: 2007 Bernard Matthews H5N1 outbreak

Cellardyke was the first place in the UK that an instance of avian influenza, caused by the H5N1 subtype of the Influenza A virus, was confirmed. A dead swan was found floating in Cellardyke harbour on March 29, 2006 by local resident Tina Briscoe. It was subsequently collected after Raymond Briscoe contacted the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. The Veterinary Laboratories Agency (VLA) began testing blood samples from the wild swan on April 3, 2006. The Scottish Executive announced a positive test of the blood samples on April 5, 2006, and the strain was identified as the highly pathogenic H5N1 variant on April 6, 2006.

The bird was a Whooper Swan of whom around 7,500 are thought to come to the UK during the winter. These are known to migrate from Iceland, Scandinavia and northern Russia. Some experts have suggested that the swan could have died in another country and been washed up on the coast.

The incident put Cellardyke on the map, and worldwide TV and Radio coverage of the events were broadcast from the small harbour, which was besieged by media vehicles and made the locals who were involved 'celebrities'. The coverage lasted nearly a week and included live interviews with Mrs Briscoe by both ITV and the BBC as well as every national newspaper in the country covering the story to some degree or another.

External links

• Cellardyke on FifeDirect
• Undiscovered Scotland: Cellardyke
• Gazetteer for Scotland: Overview of Cellardyke
• BBC News: Bird flu swan 'domestic species'
• Times Online: 1,000 sq mile exclusion zone set up