Qualla: Moray Firth

Moray Firth: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Julian Paren, CC BY-SA 2.0. From Buckie on a clear day you can see Wick, fifty miles up the coast. From Lossiemouth you can pick out the hills of Caithness - the rounded mass of Morven, the long ridge of Scaraben. From Burghead, with very good light, the white face of Dunrobin Castle materialises across the water. The Moray Firth is large enough to hold these long sight-lines, large enough to contain its own weather, and old enough that its name gave its name to the medieval kingdom of Moray, which in turn became the name of a province of Scotland.

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Image: Julian Paren | CC BY-SA 2.0

Moray Firth: A Triangle of Sea

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Julian Paren, CC BY-SA 2.0. Geographically the Moray Firth is a roughly triangular inlet of the North Sea, with its three corners at Duncansby Head in the far north of Caithness, Fraserburgh in eastern Aberdeenshire, and the city of Inverness at the apex of the western end. It is the largest firth in Scotla...

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Image: Julian Paren | CC BY-SA 2.0

Moray Firth: The Bottlenose Dolphins

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rene at Danish Wikipedia, Public domain. Off Chanonry Point on a rising tide, sometimes within a few metres of the shore, the bottlenose dolphins surface. They are the most northerly population of the species in the world. The inner firth is home to perhaps 200 of them, the only resident bottlenose population in the Nor...

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Image: Rene at Danish Wikipedia | Public domain

Moray Firth: Oil, Then Wind

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Scotland_location_map.svg: Eric Gaba, NordNordWest derivative work: Uwe Dedering, CC BY-SA 3.0. About twenty miles south of Wick lay the Beatrice oilfield - the closest of the North Sea oil fields, discovered in 1976 and producing first oil in 1981. Beatrice was decommissioned in 2017. On the same shallow seabed, on the same patch of firth, the Beatrice Offshore Wind Farm n...

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Image: Scotland_location_map.svg: Eric Gaba, NordNordWest derivative work: Uwe Dedering | CC BY-SA 3.0

Moray Firth: Where the Name Came From

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Des Colhoun, CC BY-SA 2.0. Moray and the Moray Firth share a name and possibly a meaning. Linguists have argued for two derivations from Gaelic and Celtic roots. One traces it from Muir, the Gaelic word for sea, giving Murar or Morar. The other reads it from the Celtic Mur (sea) and Tav (side), condensed t...

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Image: Des Colhoun | CC BY-SA 2.0