Coordinates: 58°27′14″N 3°05′20″W / 58.454°N 3.089°W / 58.454; -3.089
Wick (Scottish Gaelic: Inbhir Ùige, Scots: Week or Weik) is a town and royal burgh in Caithness, in the far north of Scotland. The town straddles the River Wick and extends along both sides of Wick Bay. Wick Locality had a population of 7,333 at the time of the 2001 census.
Pulteneytown, which was developed on the south side of the river by the British Fisheries Society during the 19th century, was officially merged into the burgh in 1902.
The town is on the main highway (the A99-A9 road) linking John o' Groats with southern Britain. The Far North railway line links Wick railway station with southern Scotland and with Thurso, the other burgh of Caithness. Wick Airport is on Wick's northern outskirts. The airport has two usable runways. A third is derelict.
The main offices of The John O'Groat Journal and The Caithness Courier are located in Wick, as are Caithness General Hospital (run by NHS Highland), the Wick Carnegie Library and local offices of the Highland Council. Wick Sheriff Court is one of 16 sheriff courts serving the sheriffdom of Grampian, Highland and Islands.
Caithness (Scottish Gaelic: Gallaibh [ˈɡ̊al̪ˠɪv], Scots: Caitnes) is a registration county, lieutenancy area and historic local government area of Scotland.
Caithness has a land boundary with the historic local government area of Sutherland and is otherwise bounded by sea. The land boundary follows a watershed and is crossed by two roads, the A9 and the A836, and one railway, the Far North Line. Across the Pentland Firth ferries link Caithness with Orkney, and Caithness also has an airport at Wick. The Pentland Firth island of Stroma is within Caithness.
The name was also used for the earldom of Caithness and the Caithness constituency of the Parliament of the United Kingdom (1708 to 1918). Boundaries are not identical in all contexts, but the Caithness area is now entirely within the Highland council area.
Caithness is one of the Watsonian vice-counties, subdivisions of Britain and Ireland which are used largely for the purposes of biological recording and other scientific data-gathering. The vice-counties were introduced by Hewett Cottrell Watson who first used them in the third volume of his Cybele Britannica published in 1852. He refined the system somewhat in later volumes, but the vice-counties remain unchanged by subsequent local government reorganisations, allowing historical and modern data to be more accurately compared. They provide a stable basis for recording using similarly-sized units, and, although grid-based reporting has grown in popularity, they remain a standard in the vast majority of ecological surveys, allowing data collected over long periods of time to be compared easily.
Before the Act of Union 1707, the barons of the shire or sheriffdom of Caithness elected commissioners to represent them in the unicameral Parliament of Scotland and in the Convention of Estates. After 1708, Caithness alternated with Buteshire in returning one member the House of Commons of Great Britain and later to the House of Commons of the United Kingdom.
The Lord Lieutenant of Caithness is the British monarch's personal representative in an area defined since 1975 as consisting of the local government district of Caithness, in Scotland. This definition was renewed by the Lord-Lieutenants (Scotland) Order 1996. Previously, the area of the lieutenancy was the county of Caithness, which was abolished as a local government area by the Local Government (Scotland) Act 1973. The district was created under the 1973 act as a district of the two-tier Highland region and abolished as a local government area under the Local Government (Scotland) Act 1994, which turned the Highland region into a unitary council area.
Coordinates: 58°27′14″N 3°05′20″W / 58.454°N 3.089°W / 58.454; -3.089
Wick (Scottish Gaelic: Inbhir Ùige, Scots: Week or Weik) is a town and royal burgh in Caithness, in the far north of Scotland. The town straddles the River Wick and extends along both sides of Wick Bay. Wick Locality had a population of 7,333 at the time of the 2001 census.
Pulteneytown, which was developed on the south side of the river by the British Fisheries Society during the 19th century, was officially merged into the burgh in 1902.
The town is on the main highway (the A99-A9 road) linking John o' Groats with southern Britain. The Far North railway line links Wick railway station with southern Scotland and with Thurso, the other burgh of Caithness. Wick Airport is on Wick's northern outskirts. The airport has two usable runways. A third is derelict.
The main offices of The John O'Groat Journal and The Caithness Courier are located in Wick, as are Caithness General Hospital (run by NHS Highland), the Wick Carnegie Library and local offices of the Highland Council. Wick Sheriff Court is one of 16 sheriff courts serving the sheriffdom of Grampian, Highland and Islands.
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