Fordyce
Banffshire Coast Leaflet (500K)Like neighbouring Crovie, Fordyce is today a conservation village.
If you gave a ‘pink loving’, seven year old girl a pen and told her to draw her own fairytale village, she’d probably draw Fordyce without knowing it.
The village was based on a medieval plan and still has its 13th century church and a 16th century castle built right in its centre. The origins of the village are believed to go back nearly 1400 years to the foundation of a church here by the Pictish Saint, St Tarlarican (St Tarquin). The village has the air of a refined French chateau about it and it’s a small warren of streets lined with beautifully preserved medieval buildings.
On 10 May 1499, Bishop Elphinstone, founder of Aberdeen University, was granted a charter which gave Fordyce Burgh of Barony status. On 10th May 1999 Fordyce celebrated its 500th anniversary. It’s believed that a (frequently drunken) Sunday market used to take place in the kirkyard, until it was discovered that this had only been permitted thanks to a mistaken reading of an earlier village charter!
As if in keeping with its traditional atmosphere, the Fordyce Joiners’ Workshop attraction shows the skills of the true rural craftsman from the days before mass produced goods. You can discover early workshop machinery which would have today’s health and safety officers blood pressure collectively rise to a dangerous level.
Fordyce truly is a picture perfect village which seems to revel in its inland position where houses did not have to be built ‘shoulder on’ to the sea to weather the storms. It provides a charming, quaint, somewhat refined contrast to its more rugged neighbouring coastal fishing villages.
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