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Whitehills Westwards of the county town of
Banff stretches the wide sweep of Banff Links, extending into Boyndie Bay, at the far end of which one
crosses the Burn of Boyndie to reach the great hump of Knock Head.
Immediately on the west side of this massive headland is the village of Whitehills, the port and principal populated place of the thanage of the Boyne, in ancient times a forest and now perhaps the most fertile farming region in Banffshire. There was a small fishing village here at the end of the 16th cent., but the present town was largely the creation of the
19th-cent. herring boom.While many a fishing burgh along this coast has lost its fishing fleet, Whitehills. which never aspired to burghal status, has retained both its fleet and its vitality. Its appearance of modernity is
deceptive, for descendants of families who were settled in Whitehills over 300 years ago live in it today. The attractive name Lovie, for example, appears in the Kirk Session records in 1623, and there are still many Lovies in Whitehills. In 1842, the
parish minister enumerated in the village 117 Watsons, forty-seven Lovies, twenty-five Adam-sons, twenty-five Findlays, and twenty-three Ritchies.This continuity in the basic stock of the place has resulted in an intense spirit of independence and self-help, demonstrated
many times in incidents of local history. Before the days of state education, the fishermen of Whitehills ferried in
their boats all the timber required from spey-mouth
in Moray to roof the General Assembly school in the village. At a slightly later date, they moved, stone by stone from Banff, an entire
church, which they re-erected in the village. This building, now called Trinity Church, can be inspected on the main highway leading into the village.At Inverboyndie, 1 m. E. of Whitehills, are the ruins of the ancient pre-Reformation Church of St Brandon. Its W. gable is crowned by a fine belfry with carved stonework below. The
name of St Brandon the Navigator is repeated everywhere in the area in such place-names as Brangan and Pitterbrangan, and in Brangan's Stanes, which are large hornblende stones huddled together in an ancient burial site.The second oldest building in the district is the ruined Castle of the Boyne in the glen of the Burn of Boyne, 3 m. W. of Whitehills. It had a much more ancient predecessor, the Castle of the Craig of Boyne on a cliff at the mouth of the burn.
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