Banffshire is a historic county of north-east Scotland, its outline running roughly triangular between the Moray Firth coast and a wild southern mountain district where Cairngorm itself, source of the smoky quartz gemstones that bear its name, rises to over 4,000 feet. An eighteenth-century survey traced the county's rivers, the Avon, Fiddich and Deveron among them, descending through deep forested glens toward the sea, and noted rich deposits of limestone and, at Portsoy, a distinctive marble long quarried for ornamental architecture and already exported for decorative use well beyond Scotland.
Banff, the county town at the mouth of the Deveron, combined modest thread and stocking manufacture with a school that let children alternate between work and lessons, and with a salmon trade exporting the Deveron's catch to distant markets; nearby stood Duff House, the grand seat of the Earl of Fife with the river winding around its lawns, reached by a handsome seven-arched bridge. Portsoy and Macduff supported fishing and quarrying trades of their own, while Cullen, an ancient burgh near the ruined castle once prominent in early Scottish history, shipped crabs and lobsters as far as London and dried white fish for the markets of Montrose, Dundee and Leith.
Further inland, the county shared with neighbouring Moray the fertile ground of Speyside, where the River Spey's tributaries were already nurturing the distilling trade that would grow, over the following century, into the internationally recognised heart of Scotch malt whisky production. In the mountainous south, sheep and black cattle dominated a pastoral economy where, the same survey noted with evident disapproval, some tenants still owed their landlords old-fashioned labour services that did little to encourage agricultural improvement.