Qualla: Tarlair Swimming Pool

Tarlair Swimming Pool: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ann Harrison, CC BY-SA 2.0. Picture this. It is 1931, and Macduff has just opened a swimming pool at the foot of a sea cliff. Not a building containing a pool - a complex of pools carved into the rocky shore, fed by the Moray Firth itself, designed so that every high tide rinses the main basin clean. The Press and Journal called it the Mecca of the Moray Firth. The dance bands came. The crowds came. For sixty-five years, Tarlair drew people down the cliff path to swim in seawater on the edge of Aberdeenshire. Then, in the mid-1990s, the gates closed and the wave-replenishment system fell still.

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Image: Ann Harrison | CC BY-SA 2.0

Tarlair Swimming Pool: A Lido at the Cliff's Foot

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Emptycell, CC BY-SA 3.0. The site is improbable. Sandstone cliffs rise behind a flat shelf of rock, and on that shelf John C. Miller, Burgh Surveyor of Macduff, laid out a main pool with a diving board, a children's chute, a boating pool, and two paddling pools. Robert Morrison and Son did the building. ...

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Image: Emptycell | CC BY-SA 3.0

Tarlair Swimming Pool: How the Sea Cleaned the Pools

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Grahame Hadden, CC BY-SA 3.0. The engineering had a quiet elegance. Sea water pumped up to fill the basins on a calm day. At high tide, waves breached the main pool's outer wall and flushed the old water back out, scouring the floor as they went. There was no chlorine, no filtration plant, no chemistry to mon...

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Image: Grahame Hadden | CC BY-SA 3.0

Tarlair Swimming Pool: Going Quiet

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Martyn Gorman, CC BY-SA 2.0. By the mid-1990s Tarlair had closed. Holidays had moved abroad, indoor pools had become the norm, and the cost of maintaining open-air seawater bathing against Aberdeenshire weather became impossible to justify. The complex sat empty. Channel 4 came to film it for the third episo...

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Image: Martyn Gorman | CC BY-SA 2.0

Tarlair Swimming Pool: The Friends Step In

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Emptycell, CC BY-SA 4.0. Friends of Tarlair formed in 2012. By 2014 they had begun on the boating pool and terraces, and in May 2023 the work shifted to the buildings themselves. The boating pool stays landlocked for now - it will only be filled again once the main pool is finished and the whole wave-rep...

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Image: Emptycell | CC BY-SA 4.0

Tarlair Swimming Pool: Standing Above the Pavilion

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Martyn Gorman, CC BY-SA 2.0. From the clifftop the layout reads at a glance - the rectangle of the main pool, the curved boating basin, the pavilion in pale Art Deco lines, the steps cut down to the shore. Beyond it all is the firth, grey or silver or blue depending on the day, with Macduff harbour a mile we...

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Image: Martyn Gorman | CC BY-SA 2.0