Firth

Firth is a word in the Scots and English languages used to denote various coastal waters in Scotland and even a strait. In the Northern Isles, it more usually refers to a smaller inlet. It is linguistically cognate to fjord (both from Proto-Germanic *ferþuz) which has a more constrained sense in English. Bodies of water named “firths” tend to be more common on the east coast, or in the southwest of the country, although the Firth of Lorn is an exception to this. The Highland coast contains numerous estuaries, straits, and inlets of a similar kind, but not called “firth” (e.g. the Minch and Loch Torridon); instead, these are often called sea lochs. Before about 1850, the spelling “Frith” was more common.

A firth is generally the result of ice age glaciation and is very often associated with a large river, where erosion caused by the tidal effects of incoming sea water passing upriver has widened the riverbed into an estuary. Demarcation can be rather vague. The Firth of Clyde is sometimes thought to include the estuary as far upriver as Dumbarton, but the Ordnance Survey map shows the change from river to firth occurring off Port Glasgow, while locally the change is held to be at the Tail of the Bank where the river crosses a sandbar off Greenock at the junction to the Gare Loch, or even further west at Gourock point.