Historically, there has been a long legacy of commercial fishing in Scotland where it has developed from a subsistence activity – one undertaken to feed the fisher and their immediate community by the earliest settlers in Scotland, around 7000 BC – to a major food source and export commodity.
During the 19th century, fishing for herring, white fish and fin fish thrived and at the peak of the Herring Boom in 1907, 2,500,000 barrels of fish (227,000 tonnes) were caught and exported to Europe and beyond. Now these stocks have become commercially extinct and the two principal fishing sectors that remain in Scotland are prawn and scallop fishing.
Today, creel fishing, which involves laying dozens
