New exhibition at Timespan in Helmsdale celebrates the ‘Herring Girls’

For decades, they followed the 'silver darlings' herring fishing, providing a livelihood for hundreds of Scottish women.

Dubbed the Herring Girls, they travelled from port to port between June and September, following fleets of boats to gut the fish and pack them in barrels for export.

Now an exhibition in Sutherland is to celebrate the women’s incredible hard work.

Red Herring, by visual artist Joanne Coates, will launch this year's summer season at Timespan in Helmsdale.

It will explore the legacy of the Herring Girls — a migrant female workforce central to the fishing industry between the 19th and 20th centuries.

Through photography, ceramics, installation, archival images and objects, performance, and a newly co-created celebratory herring crown, Coates examines "women's labour, class solidarity, and the inequalities that continue to shape the lives of working-class women today".

During her six-month residency at Timespan, Coates worked closely with the local communities and conducted extensive research in regional archives. A key part of the exhibition is a series of performances in which she recreates the movements and routines of the gutting girls, drawing on fragmentary memories passed down through generations.

Timespan says: "By reclaiming these histories, Red Herring highlights how working-class women’s labour has long been undervalued and overlooked.

“The exhibition invites us to question how these histories have been told, to reconsider their significance, and to reflect on the ongoing impact of class and gender inequalities in shaping our world today."

The exhibition, which opens on March 29, is supported by Creative Scotland, the Highland Council Ward Discretionary Fund, and the Foyle Foundation.

Just over 35 miles up the coast, Wick in Caithness was nicknamed the herring capital of Europe due to the volume of fish landed there and was one of the main destinations for the fish gutters.

Women worked in the curing yards at long troughs called farlins. The workstations and the women's clothes were quickly covered by smelly, slimy fish guts.

The gutters had to work fast because they were paid by how many barrels they could fill.

The scale of the Scottish industry was staggering.

More than 2.5 million barrels of cured fish were exported to Germany, Eastern Europe, and Russia in 1907, a "boom" year.

And 35,000 people were employed in the industry in the 1900s - 14,000 of them were women.

By 1913, there were some 10,000 boats in the Scottish industry.

In Wick, the work was concentrated in Lower Pultneytown, a part of Wick designed in the 19th century by the famous Scottish engineer Thomas Telford to support Britain's booming fishing industry.

From Wick, the gutters followed the fishing boats on the trail of herring as they migrated south along the coasts of Scotland and England.

Many of the gutters ended the season in Yarmouth on the south-east coast of England.

The women travelled by train, and there are accounts of carriages filled with the singing of hymns and Gaelic songs, and the gutters making tea on small stoves.

Their personal belongings were packed into a wooden box called a kist, and the women would bring home sticks of rock from English seaside towns as a treat for their families. But the herring boom was not to last. There were periods of disruption caused by the two world wars, with many fishermen joining merchant shipping or the Royal Navy. But the biggest factor was overfishing and the herring boom in Scotland finally came to an end in the 1960s.

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