A third generation fisherman off the west coast of Scotland, Bally Philp remembers when Kyle Lochalsh Pier was a throng of activity; the heart of a local fishing economy harbouring up to 50 boats at a time – creel fishers and small trawlers among them – most of which would feed into the focal point of the harbour itself: the prawn processing factory once owned by his father.

Through the 1990s, this was the epicentre of the fishing community. Catch was up, as was local employment. A fisherman could find his fortune in the seas off Scotland, and didn’t have to travel far to find it due to the removal of a three-mile inshore limit in 1984. It was a period of assumed abundance and endless resource. But it was short-lived.

The lifting of the inshore limit had opened up the seabed to all manner of high-impact fishing. Beneath the waves, a critical issue was tightening its grip. With little heed paid to the scientific advice of the time, the majority of species – cod, whiting, and herring among them – were teetering on the brink of collapse. Some suggested it was during the decade prior that they already had. Opening the fishery to such an extent was premature, and in the four short decades since the 1980s, populations of each have been decimated.

By the turn of this decade, Kyle Lochalsh Pier painted a very different picture. The once crowded and bustling harbour stood desolate, the air seldom singing with local chatter among fishermen landing their catch, and the processing factory – the focal point of the thriving local economy – stood derelict, empty of both fish and fishermen. Landings of herring – which, for a short spell between 1995 and the turn of the new millennium, were totalling close to 40,000 tonnes – turned out to be unviable. By 2000, the fishery suffered a sharp and sudden drop. Ten years later it was struggling to record even 5,000 tonnes.

“At one point, there were around 30,000 herring fishermen in Scotland,” remembers Philp. “Now I imagine there are probably not even 100. Today, you’d be hard pressed to spot just one fishing boat on Kyle Lochalsh Pier. Certainly here on the west coast of Scotland, we haven’t had a quota for herring for a decade. Not since the collapse. We have no herring fishery left at all on the west coast, and we don’t appear to have a recovery plan for it.”

The bones of a local economy with the flesh picked off, Kyle Lochalsh was little more than just another casualty of a silent crisis gripping the coastline not only around Scotland, but the whole of the UK. This is an industry in decline. And the culprit is overfishing.

One of the purported benefits of Brexit – the 2016 referendum in which the UK voted to leave the European Union – was the promise to “take back control” of the country’s borders which, for the fishing industry, extended 12 nautical miles beyond the country’s coastline. It was a compelling sell.