For a sense of place before you arrive, look beyond conventional travel writing — the literature of the Banffshire coast is sparse but specific.
The Bard of Banff is a slim local volume blending photographs, history, and verse covering Banff and Macduff. It's a souvenir-shop staple and unsentimental about the place's slow decline as a fishing port; the map at the back is genuinely useful for finding the lesser-known corners.
The Silver Darlings by Neil M. Gunn is the great novel of the 19th-century herring fishery on the Moray Firth coast. Set in Caithness rather than Banffshire, it nevertheless captures the working life of the small harbours all along this shore better than any history can.
Lewis Grassic Gibbon's A Scots Quair trilogy — Sunset Song in particular — is set in the Mearns just inland from here. It is the founding novel of modern Scottish writing about the rural northeast and essential for anyone wanting to understand the landscape and the people.