Macduff is the last place in the United Kingdom where deep-water wooden fishing boats were built. The Macduff Shipyards still operate today, having transitioned to steel construction for North Sea trawlers, but the wooden boat tradition that defined the town for most of the twentieth century ended only within living memory. The shipyards built their boats for the herring fleets and the white fish trawlers that worked from Macduff harbour, the harbour the 2nd Earl Fife paid to build in 1760. The fleet has shrunk dramatically since its peak, but the harbour still smells of fish and diesel and salt rope, which is the smell of every working Scottish port north of Edinburgh.

John Smeaton's seven-arched bridge across the River Deveron, completed in 1779, is the reason Banff and Macduff function as a single urban unit. Before the bridge, the river separated them as decisively as if it had been the sea. An earlier bridge built in 1765 had lasted three years before a flood took it. A ferry came back into service and lasted five years before a flood took that. Smeaton, the engineer of the Eddystone Lighthouse, designed the present bridge to outlast the river's worst, and it has. Two hundred and forty-seven years of North Sea storms and Deveron spates have come and gone. The seven arches still stand. The road across them carries the A98 between Aberdeen and Inverness.

Macduff Lifeboat Station, RNLI, operates one of the most unusual rescue boats in Britain. The inshore lifeboat Lydia Macdonald lives on a large goods vehicle fitted with its own hydraulic crane. When the call comes the crew drive the lorry to whichever stretch of the Aberdeenshire coast needs them, lower the boat over the side or into the water, and launch from there. No other RNLI station does this. The reason is geography. The coast east and west of Macduff has small rocky coves and beaches that no slipway can serve, and a fixed lifeboat station can only respond to what is in front of it. The crane-mounted boat can respond to anything within driving distance, which along this coast is everything.

Walford Bodie lived at Manor House Macduff from 1905 until his death in 1939. He was an electric showman, a Victorian and Edwardian stage magician whose act combined hypnotism, faked surgical operations, and demonstrations of high-voltage electricity passing through his body. Bodie called himself the British Edison and claimed medical qualifications he did not possess. Medical students rioted at his shows in Glasgow in 1909, accusing him of impersonating doctors. None of which prevented him from being one of the most famous variety performers of his generation. He retired to Macduff and is buried locally. The town also produced singer-songwriter Sandi Thom, born in nearby Banff in 1981, and Eilidh Whiteford, MP for Banff and Buchan from 2010 to 2017. The mix is characteristic. Macduff has always been a town that produces interesting people and then carries on quietly.

Royal Tarlair Golf Course is built on land that ends in precipitous cliffs east of the town. The thirteenth hole is called The Clivet, and lost balls there are genuinely lost; they go over the cliff edge into the North Sea. The Macduff Marine Aquarium near the harbour is a small modern facility built around a single deep tank that recreates a section of Moray Firth seabed. Visitors can watch local fish at their natural behaviours in a tank that holds about one hundred thousand litres. Beside the harbour, the maritime heritage centre tells the story of the wooden shipyards and the herring fleet. None of these draw crowds at the scale of Banff's Duff House, which is what Macduff seems to prefer.