Pages from Derek Jennings 'Notes on Historic Buchan; A Brief Look at the Last Five Millennia':

In the early 19th Century a plan was formulated to build a canal through Buchan. This was initiated and paid for by Ferguson of Pitfour. It was his intention to open the lands to the sea. Lime could be brought form the coast for his fields, and produce from the estates could more easily be transported to the coast.

The main canal was 4 miles long and stretched from the Howe of Rora to Inverugie. From Inverugie there may have been an outlet to the sea near St Fergus. There is a cutting here which appears to be too wide and deep for a drainage ditch. Remnants of the canal can still be seen at the Cuttie burn, and a reservoir at Hall Moss farm, near Peterhead. The Inverquinzie branch was dug by itinerant Irish labourers who were paid 1 shilling and 4 pence a day or 1 pence per day if they were left handed. They were called 'Navigators' or 'Navvies' and they often lived in 'miserable huts composed almost entirely of rotting straw and a few sticks, it size would not be sufficient for a pigsty'.

Scottish canal building began about 1770 and was mainly due to a growing demand in the cities for stone, coal, slate and grain. In return manure from the large city middens could be conveyed to the fields. The canal building age lasted about 50 years, but by the 1840's they were threatened by a quicker more efficient mode of transport, the railways.