Fraserburgh — "the Broch" to locals — is a fishing town on the northeastern tip of Aberdeenshire, where the North Sea meets the Moray Firth. It is one of Scotland's most important fishing ports, and despite decades of change in the industry, fish is still at the heart of the place. The bronze herring on Broad Street says it plainly.
The town grew around Kinnaird Head, where in 1787 the first lighthouse in Scotland was built inside a 16th-century castle tower. That lighthouse, now decommissioned, is the centrepiece of Scotland's Lighthouse Museum. The adjacent Fraserburgh Heritage Centre is stronger than it looks from the outside, with material on Thomas Blake Glover — the Fraserburgh-born merchant who helped modernise Japan during the Meiji era and inspired the story of Madama Butterfly — and on the town's remarkable fishing and boat-building past.
The beach at Fraserburgh Bay is one of the finest in northeastern Scotland: a long sweep of golden sand backed by dunes, stretching east from the harbour with rarely a crowd in sight. The coast south toward Peterhead is largely beaches all the way, interrupted by the dramatic headland at Troup Head where gannets and puffins breed in summer. Inland, Aberdeenshire is dense with Pictish symbol stones, stone circles, and a chain of river castles. Fraserburgh makes a good base for exploring the far northeast corner of Scotland that most visitors never reach.