- Cullen Postcode AB56
- Cullen Latitude: 57.6916° N Longitude: -2.8219° W
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Cullen Moray is known as the queen of Banffshires Moray Firth coast resorts, for reasons which must be apparent to anyone at first glimpse of the place. Even the railway (closed to traffic many years ago) has contributed to its spectacular" vistas by a long curving viaduct, under which the main road passes from the square to the sea-town at cliff-top altitude, framing a delectable view of headland and harbour; gaily-painted fisher cottages. close-packed, with gable-ends to the shore; and the white sands stretching for nearly 2 miles to the headland of Scar Nose, at the west end of the bay.
Some bays can be monotonous, but not Cullen Bay, thanks to its profusion of isolated rocks, the Three Kings, the Bow Fiddle, Boar Crag, and Red Craig. Its sands are said to sing. Sunnyside in Logie Bay, to the east, give them a glancing blow and they respond with a sonorous ‘Woo, woo. woo’, due to the friction of their uniform spherical grains.
Modern Cullen was built between 1820 and 1830 to plans by George MacWilliam for the Earl of Seafield, to replace the ancient burgh clustered around the old parish church in the immediate surroundings of Cullen House, about 1.5 miles to the south.
Cullen's first extant charter was granted by James 11 in 1455, although there was probably a royal castle there in early feudal times, and it may have been there in 1327 that Queen Elizabeth the second wife of Robert I, died.
He endowed a chaplaincy at the Church of St Mary of Cullen to pray for her soul. The existing old parish church (St Anne's Aisle) dates from 1536., to which was added in 1543 one of the last Collegiate Churches to be built before the Reformation, although a solitary round arch survives to indicate a building of the period 1180-1280. There is a particularly fine sacrament house on the north wall, and near it an elaborate sculptured monument to Alexander Ogilvy, by whose donation the Collegiate Churchwas erected.
Within a stones throw of the church is Cullen House, the former seat of the earls of Seafield, which has 386 rooms. The main part of the house dates from A.D 1543, but an east wing was added in 1711, and alterations and additions were made in 1858 by David Bryce.
In September 1975, by order of the 13th Earl of Seafield. almost the entire contents of this splendid mansion which, with certain ‘fixtures’, is listed as of special architectural interest, were sold there in a three-day public auction, which realized £350,857.
