Welcome to Lossiemouth!
Lossiemouth is a village on the coast of Moray in North East Scotland, with a population in 2016 of 7870. It developed as a fishing port in the 18th and 19th centuries, but the harbour is small and that industry has gone. Its main business now is as a service town for RAF Lossiemouth, the base for Britain's Quick Reaction Alert Interceptors.
So this unassuming little place now stands on the frontline of NATO's air defenses. Russian bomber planes, some of them supersonic, regularly hurtle across the Norwegian and North Seas towards the UK. They are intercepted while still in international air space by Typhoon FGR4 fighters from RAF Lossiemouth. Everyone shows off their prowess and alertness, exchanges pleasantries, and goes home safe. And yet another gambit has been played out across the great chessboard that stretches over quiet fields and icy seas and forests and onion domes.
Lossiemouth (Scottish Gaelic: Inbhir Losaidh) is a town in Moray, Scotland. Originally the port belonging to Elgin, it became an important fishing town. Although there have been over 1,000 years of settlement in the area, the present-day town was formed over the past 250 years and consists of four separate communities that eventually merged into one. From 1890 to 1975 it was a police burgh as Lossiemouth and Branderburgh.
Stotfield, the first significant settlement (discounting Kinneddar which has now disappeared), lies to the northwest of the town. Next was the Seatown – a small area between the river and the canal inholding of 52 houses, 51 of which are the historic fisher cottages. When the new harbour was built on the River Lossie, the 18th-century planned town of Lossiemouth, built on a grid system, was established on the low ground below Coulard Hill. Branderburgh formed the final development during the 19th century. This part of the town developed entirely as a result of the new harbour with its two basins, and eventually covered the entire Coulard Hill, it has an impressive profile when seen from a distance.