Scotland

Scotland's coast is the longest and most complex in Britain, running from the Solway Firth at the English border up the Atlantic-facing west coast through the Hebrides, around Cape Wrath at the north-western tip, along the wild north coast past Thurso, down the east coast through Aberdeen, Dundee, and the Forth at Edinburgh, and back to the Tweed at the southern border. Tide signatures vary across that range as much as the geology does. The east coast at Leith, Aberdeen, and the Moray Firth runs a moderate semidiurnal pattern: mean range at Leith on the Firth of Forth is about 3.6 metres, climbing past 4.6 on spring tides. Further north along the Moray Firth coast at Inverness the range similar; at Wick on the Pentland Firth the swing drops below 3 metres. The Pentland Firth itself between Caithness and the Orkney Islands runs some of the strongest tidal currents in the world — over 12 knots in places — and is the focus of the country's pioneering tidal-stream energy industry. The west coast at Oban and the Hebrides runs a smaller but still moderate signal driven by the open Atlantic, and the long sea lochs (Loch Linnhe, Loch Fyne, Loch Sunart) propagate the open-coast tide tens of kilometres inland. Salmon fishers, sea kayakers, ferry skippers running the Caledonian MacBrayne lines, and Arbroath fishing crews working the east-coast lobster grounds all read the table for different windows. UK Hydrographic Office Admiralty TotalTide is the authoritative product; the gridded predictions on this site are useful for daily planning but not for piloting.