The Eyemouth Herring Queen Festival celebrated in
Eyemouth
Eyemouth ( sco, Heymooth) is a small town and civil parish in Berwickshire, in the Scottish Borders area of Scotland. It is east of the main north–south A1 road and north of Berwick-upon-Tweed.
The town's name comes from its location at th ...
in the
Borders
A border is a geographical boundary.
Border, borders, The Border or The Borders may also refer to:
Arts, entertainment and media Film and television
* ''Border'' (1997 film), an Indian Hindi-language war film
* ''Border'' (2018 Swedish film), ...
, owes its origins to what was called the Peace Picnic or Fisherman's Picnic. The first Peace Picnic was organised by J. C. Chrystie to celebrate the end of the
1914 - 1918 war. This day came to be celebrated throughout the following years and to be looked upon as a local holiday for the
fishermen
A fisher or fisherman is someone who captures fish and other animals from a body of water, or gathers shellfish.
Worldwide, there are about 38 million commercial and subsistence fishers and fish farmers. Fishers may be professional or recreat ...
of the town and all connected with their calling.
During the preliminary arrangements for the 1939 picnic, the committee felt that the crowning of a Queen would not only be of interest to the young folk of the town but would prove to be a ceremony in which they could symbolise, in many ways, the ideals as well as the everyday things associated with the life of a fishing community.
The modern way of life brought about many changes since the days of Chrystie but the symbolism is still the same: the children still enjoy their picnic and the Queen is still crowned. For a long period up to 2001, the
Herring
Herring are forage fish, mostly belonging to the family of Clupeidae.
Herring often move in large schools around fishing banks and near the coast, found particularly in shallow, temperate waters of the North Pacific and North Atlantic Oceans, i ...
Queen was selected by popular vote in the local High School but this changed to a process whereby a panel of local townspeople make the selection after nominees were interviewed.
See also
*
Fishing industry in Scotland
The fishing industry in Scotland comprises a significant proportion of the United Kingdom fishing industry. A recent inquiry by the Royal Society of Edinburgh found fishing to be of much greater social, economic and cultural importance to Scot ...
External links
Eyemouth Herring Queen Festival
Festivals in Scotland
Tourist attractions in the Scottish Borders
Fishing in Scotland
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