Anstruther

Queue, Burn and Harbour

On the harbour front at Shore Street there is usually a queue, and it is usually for the Anstruther Fish Bar. It won UK Fish & Chip Shop of the Year in 2009, beating around a thousand competitors, and has been named Scotland's best four times. In 2009 it became the first chip shop in Britain accredited by the Marine Stewardship Council. Robert and Alison Smith have run it since 2003. The queue is the price of admission.

Anstruther sits in the East Neuk — the "east corner" — of Fife, on the north shore of the Firth of Forth, at the mouth of the Dreel Burn. The burn once divided the parishes of Anstruther Easter and Anstruther Wester, and the town still has the feel of two places that agreed to become one. Cobbled streets and wynds run down to a sheltered harbour. The cottages are pantiled and crow-stepped, and some still carry their original dated shop signs.

Herring Fleet and Museum Boats

The harbour was, for a long time, the point of the whole place. During the herring golden age of the 19th and early 20th centuries, more fish were caught and traded here than at any other port in Scotland. Undiscovered Scotland records that a century ago it was so busy "it was possible to walk from one side of the wide harbour to the other by stepping from one fishing boat to the next." Then the North Sea herring stocks collapsed, and the fleet went with them.

What is left is the Scottish Fisheries Museum, arranged around three sides of a cobbled courtyard that includes a 16th-century Abbot's Lodging and an 18th-century merchant's house. It holds over 66,000 items and eighteen boats. The pride of them is the Reaper, a 104-year-old twin-masted Fifie herring drifter moored at the harbour, across the water from the New Ship Tavern. The Ship reopened in April 2023 after a refurbishment and is a drinks-led harbour local — dog and family friendly, no meals.

Historic Inn and Island Sailing

For food with a table, the Dreel Tavern in Anstruther Wester is a 17th-century inn with a beer garden overlooking the burn. The kitchen does flat iron steaks, salmon fish cakes, ham hock terrine and sticky toffee pudding, and the pub is CAMRA-listed for its real ales. It stands beside the site of Dreel Castle, which survives now only as the origin of the Beggar's Benison, a notorious gentlemen's club founded here in 1732.

From the harbour the May Princess sails almost daily between April and September to the Isle of May, a nature reserve that holds up to 250,000 seabirds, some 46,000 pairs of breeding puffins, and around 300 resident seals. The round trip runs four and a half hours with a few hours ashore.

The Coastal Path and Coast Bus

Walkers have the Fife Coastal Path. The four miles to Crail pass through Cellardyke, its old sea walls, and the rust-red Caiplie Caves before Crail's painted harbour comes into view. The 95 bus runs the coast to St Andrews and Leven roughly every twenty minutes.

Shells, Plaques and Local Eccentrics

Up on the High Street a plaque marks where Thomas Chalmers was born. Round the corner is Buckie House, its east gable studded with scallop shells and whelks by a slater named Andrew Batchelor, who also built himself a shell-covered coffin and charged pennies to look at it.