Mearns Leader

About Mearns Leader

The Mearns Leader is a weekly newspaper published in Stonehaven, Aberdeenshire, serving the town and the surrounding Mearns area. Established in 1912, it has chronicled life in the historic county of Kincardineshire for well over a century. Published by National World as part of its Scottish regional portfolio, it remains the community newspaper for one of the most distinctive districts of north-east Scotland — a coastline of fishing villages and a hinterland of some of the richest farmland in the country.

Founding in 1912

The Mearns Leader was established in 1912 in Stonehaven, the county town of Kincardineshire. It arrived in a town with a long newspaper tradition — the Stonehaven Journal had been published since 1846 — and quickly established itself as the paper of record for the Mearns district. Its early editions, preserved in newspaper archives with holdings spanning 1913 to 1994, record a county on the eve of the First World War: its farms, its fishing fleet, its burghs and its country estates, all reported in the meticulous detail characteristic of the Edwardian provincial press.

The Mearns: the paper’s district

The Mearns — from the Gaelic A’ Mhaoirne, meaning “the Stewartry” — is the historic name for Kincardineshire, the coastal county between Aberdeenshire and Angus. Stonehaven, the county town, is its largest settlement: a harbour town famous for its Hogmanay fireballs ceremony, its picturesque harbour and the nearby Dunnottar Castle, the dramatic clifftop fortress that draws visitors from around the world. The county’s other burghs — Banchory, Inverbervie and Laurencekirk — and its string of fishing villages along the coast, from Catterline to Johnshaven and Gourdon, all fall within the Leader’s orbit.

Inland, the Mearns is among the most fertile farming districts in Scotland, a rolling landscape of arable farms that has long been known as the granary of the north-east. The paper’s journalism has always reflected this dual character: the sea and the land, the harbour and the farm, the fishing village and the market town.

A century of the Leader

Across more than 110 years of publication, the Mearns Leader has recorded the transformation of its district. Its archive — more than 51,000 pages preserved in newspaper collections, covering 1913 to 1984 and 1986 to 1994 — spans the First World War, the agricultural depression of the interwar years, the Second World War and the post-war mechanisation of farming. Later decades brought the oil boom that transformed Aberdeen and its hinterland, the growth of Stonehaven as a commuter town, and the rise of tourism along the Kincardineshire coast. Through all of it, the weekly rhythm of the Leader — published every week for the community it serves — has continued uninterrupted.

Stonehaven: the county town

Stonehaven, where the Leader is published, is one of the most attractive towns on Scotland’s east coast. Its old town clusters around a sheltered harbour that was once the base of a significant fishing fleet; its newer streets climb the hills above the sea. The town is known far beyond Scotland for its Hogmanay fireballs ceremony, in which participants swing blazing fireballs through the streets at midnight on New Year’s Eve — an event the Leader has reported on for generations. Dunnottar Castle, two miles to the south, is among Scotland’s most photographed historic sites, and the town’s open-air swimming pool, shops and restaurants make it a year-round destination. For the Leader, Stonehaven is both home and heartbeat: its council, its courts, its schools and its harbour are the staples of the paper’s news pages.

What the Leader covers

As the Mearns’ community weekly, the Leader covers the full range of district life. Aberdeenshire Council decisions affecting the area, community council debates, court proceedings, school news and the activities of the area’s churches and voluntary organisations all feature, alongside comprehensive sports coverage — football, rugby, cricket, golf and bowls — and the agricultural calendar of shows, sales and ploughing matches that punctuates the farming year. The family announcements — births, marriages, deaths and acknowledgements — remain, as they have since 1912, among the paper’s most-read pages.

The coastal villages

One of the Leader’s most distinctive roles is as the newspaper of the Mearns’ coastal villages. Communities such as Inverbervie, Gourdon, Johnshaven and Catterline — once thriving fishing ports — have their own identities and their own news, from harbour developments and lifeboat fundraisers to the fortunes of the remaining fishing boats. The weekly paper is often the only journalistic institution that treats these villages as places in their own right rather than footnotes to the county town, and its correspondents and contributors have long been drawn from the villages themselves.

Ownership: National World’s Scottish weeklies

The Mearns Leader is published by National World as part of the group’s extensive Scottish regional portfolio, which includes fellow Aberdeenshire weeklies such as the Deeside Piper and the Buchan Observer. Like many Scottish weeklies, it travelled the now-familiar path of regional press consolidation: from Johnston Press to JPIMedia following Johnston Press’s administration in 2018, to National World’s acquisition of the JPIMedia publishing assets in 2021, and then to the £65 million takeover of National World by Ireland’s Media Concierge — completed in May 2025 — which made the group a private, family-owned business trading as Iconic Media.

The weekly press in Aberdeenshire

The Mearns Leader is one of a family of weekly newspapers serving Aberdeenshire and the historic county of Kincardine, a list that includes the Deeside Piper, the Donside Piper, the Buchan Observer, the Fraserburgh Herald, the Inverurie Herald, the Ellon Times, the Huntly Express, the Banffshire Journal and the Kincardineshire Observer. Each serves a distinct district, and together they form one of the densest networks of community newspapers anywhere in Britain — a reflection of the north-east’s strong sense of local identity and its historic appetite for print.

Print and digital

The Mearns Leader continues to publish as a weekly print newspaper for Stonehaven and the Mearns, and its journalism appears online through its dedicated website, mearnsleader.co.uk. Like its sister titles, it has embraced digital publishing to reach readers beyond the print edition — including the Mearns diaspora — while keeping the weekly print edition at the heart of its relationship with its community.

The Leader’s place in Mearns life

For more than a century the Mearns Leader has been woven into the weekly routine of its district. It is the paper in which Mearns families have announced their milestones for generations — the births, marriages and deaths that form the community’s collective memory — and the paper to which readers turn for the definitive account of the week’s events, from council decisions to cup finals. In a district of market towns, fishing villages and scattered farms, the weekly paper has traditionally been the principal public forum: the place where controversies are aired in the letters page, where campaigns are launched and where local achievements are celebrated. The Leader’s longevity — publishing every week since 1912 — is itself evidence of how deeply that role is valued in the Mearns.

Official website

The Mearns Leader’s official website is mearnsleader.co.uk, where readers can find the latest news, sport and community stories from Stonehaven and the Mearns, along with subscription and contact information for the newspaper.