On Guard

Today found me on the A93 looking over the Culter Burn Bridge on the A93 in PeterCulter, looking at Rob Roy who stands guard on an elevated position on the opposite bank of the gorge to the Culter Burn weir, sluice gate & channel, and the mill lade which runs from the dam towards the former paper Culter Mill site to the south the A93 road bridge which crosses over the burn.

Culter Paper Mills was founded in 1750 by Bartholomew Smith in the rural location of Culter, just beneath the gorge of Culter Burn. Various companies worked on the lease for the site until Alexander Pirie and Sons of Aberdeen acquired it in 1864. They founded The Culter Mills Paper Co Ltd in 1865, trading in specialized paper products, and rapidly expanded the site at Culter into a large, well equipped facility. At this stage of the history, the company was effectively an subsidiary of the Pirie family’s business concerns, and all production went to other Pirie companies. In 1883 the company was reconstituted into a company of the same name that survived until the recent past. Throughout these changes, staffing and management of the mill remained consistent and continuous. The new board regularly invested in new equipment for the Mill, and output increased from 800 tons in 1865 to over 4320 tons in 1905. This product was at the high end of the paper market, including writing and printing papers, which later developed into the printing of tinted and cream writing paper, and enamelled paper for binding books and covering boxes. This emphasis on coated paper (which had a healthy profit margin) continued throughout the 1890s, and became the Mills signature product. By the late 1890s Great North of Scotland Railway had built a siding at the Mill that became Culter Station, and by 1897 the Mill was fully electrified. In 1967 it merged with the Guard Bridge Power Co Ltd, to form Culter Guard Bridge Holdings Ltd (since 1981 a public limited company) and became a holding company for the Guard Bridge Paper Co Ltd, the Culter Mills Paper Co Ltd, Scotflow Ltd, Culter Guard Bridge Export Ltd, Smith and McLaurin Ltd and the Scanneg Group of Companies. The Mills at Culter were demolished in 1981, and converted into housing and the focus of the company moved to the paper Mill at Guardbridge, Fife. In 1984