Herring Girls

Statues of a close group of herring girls who are depicted gutting herrings. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a huge fishing fleet followed the shoals of herrings along this coast. The herring girls followed the fleet by train, ready wherever it came in to gut and pack the fish. Tough, independent women, they worked in teams of three, two gutting the fish as a third packed them into barrels.


The sculptor is Emma Stothard and is one of nine such works on the sculpture trail in Whitby.