Unlike many fishing villages on this coast, Portknockie sits up on the clifftop, with a very steep road down to its harbour. Fishermen from Cullen founded the village in 1677, and by the end of the 1800s around 150 boats worked from here. The harbour you see today was built in 1890, sheltered by Green Castle, a rocky bluff where Iron Age and Pictish people built a series of forts; archaeologists found that the Pictish ramparts had been burned, possibly in a Viking attack. A short clifftop path east of the village leads to Bow Fiddle Rock, a quartzite sea arch shaped like the tip of a fiddle bow. The Moray Coast Trail passes through between Cullen and Findochty.
