Harbour, Firth Of Tay, Tayport

This is a complex harbour, established in the 18th century and extensively rebuilt between 1847 and 1851 by the Edinburgh & Northern Railway.

The harbour is divided into a roughly triangular Western Basin and an Eastern Basin. The Western Basin features a short, straight west pier constructed of squared rubble, with a stairway at its seaward end. The shoreline of the triangle is bisected by a ramped jetty, with a two-storey bay warehouse at its head. A quay extends west from the warehouse to meet the west pier, incorporating a stairway in the angle. The eastern shoreline of the Western Basin is formed by the west pier of the Eastern Basin. The shoreline to the east of the jetty is revetted with a pitched arrangement of mortared boulders.

The Eastern Basin, built in 1847 by the Edinburgh & Northern Railway, comprises a straight west pier and quay, a curved eastern pier, and a cross quay. The faces of the piers and quay are primarily constructed from rock-faced sandstone ashlar, originally featuring vertical slots for timber rubbing posts, most of which are now gone. The cross quay retains short sections of ashlar construction, with intervening wooden piled sections. The seaward face of the east pier is steeply battered and faced with mortared rubble pitching. The east pier features circular-headed entrances and stairways at both ends; the inner stairway has a curved corbelled overhang. The west pier has a rounded-head platform at its seaward end, faced with random rubble, once used for unloading railway wagons. The quay incorporates two ramped slipways, the larger northern one having a level bottom section, and a southern slipway built for a train ferry to Broughty Ferry.

The warehouse, located at the head of the jetty in the Western Basin, is a two-storey, five-by-two-bay building with a random rubble ground floor and a brick (now harled) upper floor. The original pantile roof has been replaced with concrete tiles.

In the centre of the cross quay is a rock-faced rubble abutment and wing walls relating to a railway line accessing a former coal landing point, which has since been dismantled. A late 19th-century water tank stands to the north of the coal drop; it’s a small sectional cast-iron tank on a three-tier base with an ashlar cope. The base’s lower courses are of rubble, above which are two phases of brick construction.

The Old Offices, likely dating to 1847, are a single-storey range with a piended pantiled roof, situated on the cross quay. A late 19th-century look-out tower, a four-bay, two-storey brick building with segmental-arched windows and a piended slate roof, is set at right angles to the Old Offices. A cast-iron bell, dated 1847, is suspended from a wooden post by an iron bracket on the west pier of the Eastern Basin.