At the junction of Main Street and High Street stands a bronze cow. It has a name — the Turra Coo — and it is the reason a great many people know Turriff exists at all. More on the cow shortly, because it deserves the wait.
The town itself is built from red sandstone, most of the High Street dating to the early 1800s, quarried locally and solid enough that the whole place reads as one material. Locals call it Turra, in Scots, and the name comes from the Gaelic Torraibh, meaning place of round hills. It sits above the River Deveron, where the Burn of Turriff joins it, on the main Aberdeen–Banff road.
For eating, the town keeps three proper options. The Fife Arms is one of the town's oldest buildings, white-painted and dating to 1770, at the north end of Main Street, and its restaurant leans local — pheasant goujons, sea bass, rack of lamb, loin of venison, and a breakfast that runs to six cooked dishes. The White Heather looks ordinary from the street and isn't inside; one reviewer called it "nice, bright, modern and very clean", and the kitchen does macaroni cheese, battered chicken fillets and sticky toffee pudding, with light lunches Thursday to Monday. The Crown Inn, on Crown Street, is quieter — a family-run pub with two rooms, one with a pool table and one for eating, and a good whisky shelf. The Turriff United Social Club, attached to the Highland League football ground, does a decent pint if you want the football on.
There was a time when the town was better supplied with drink. By 1800 it reportedly had more than twice as many ale and whisky houses as butchers. That ratio has since corrected.
For walking, head for the Haughs — seventy-odd acres of riverside park along the Deveron, with maintained paths, birdwatching, and the ground where the Turriff Show sets up each August. Two miles northeast, a three-mile loop runs through the woods around Delgatie Castle from its car park. The Walk Well Turriff group sets off from the sports centre and circles the den on foot.
Now the cow. In 1913 a local farmer, Robert Paterson of Lendrum, refused to stamp his workers' National Insurance cards in protest at Lloyd George's new Act. To recover the debt, a sheriff's officer seized the only movable thing on the farm — Paterson's white dairy cow. At the auction in the town square the animal turned up decorated with ribbons and painted with the words "Lendrum to Leeks", a crowd of a hundred pelted the officers with soot and rotten fruit, and the cow bolted. She was bought back by public subscription and returned to Lendrum in triumph, where she lived out her days and was buried in 1920.
Turriff Show, first held in 1864, is now Scotland's largest two-day agricultural show, drawing more than twenty-four thousand people. The Queen came for the 150th in 2014.
The local paper, the Turriff Advertiser, was founded in 1933 and known to everyone as the Squeak. It printed its last edition in 2022.
