The site is improbable. Sandstone cliffs rise behind a flat shelf of rock, and on that shelf John C. Miller, Burgh Surveyor of Macduff, laid out a main pool with a diving board, a children's chute, a boating pool, and two paddling pools. Robert Morrison and Son did the building. The Macduff Burgh Council had commissioned the design in 1929, and by 1931 swimmers were arriving on the bus from Banff. The Art Deco pavilion backed against the cliff, with changing rooms strung out to one side and the sea humming in close enough to mist the glass. Historic Environment Scotland now considers Tarlair the finest of just three surviving outdoor seaside pools left in Scotland - the other two being Stonehaven and Gourock.

The engineering had a quiet elegance. Sea water pumped up to fill the basins on a calm day. At high tide, waves breached the main pool's outer wall and flushed the old water back out, scouring the floor as they went. There was no chlorine, no filtration plant, no chemistry to monitor. The Moray Firth did the work. Bathers learned which days held warmth and which held the bracing edge that travel writers politely call invigorating. The boating pool kept its water through more tides than the main one. The paddling pools were shallow enough that the smallest visitors could stand. The diving board and the chute are both gone now, lost somewhere in the years between.

By the mid-1990s Tarlair had closed. Holidays had moved abroad, indoor pools had become the norm, and the cost of maintaining open-air seawater bathing against Aberdeenshire weather became impossible to justify. The complex sat empty. Channel 4 came to film it for the third episode of Britain's Abandoned Playgrounds. Crime novelist Stuart MacBride wrote a child's body into the main pool in The Missing and the Dead. In January 2013 Aberdeenshire Council talked seriously about filling the pools in. Public outcry shut that down. Later the same year the council pledged 300,000 pounds toward refurbishment, and in 2007 the whole complex - pavilion, kiosks, fence, all of it - had already been listed Category A, the highest grade of protection Scotland gives.

Friends of Tarlair formed in 2012. By 2014 they had begun on the boating pool and terraces, and in May 2023 the work shifted to the buildings themselves. The boating pool stays landlocked for now - it will only be filled again once the main pool is finished and the whole wave-replenishment system runs end to end as Miller designed it. In 2020 Aberdeenshire Council accepted the Friends' application to take ownership of Tarlair outright. The project moves at the pace volunteer-led restoration moves: slowly, by season, with grant applications and fundraisers between each stage. The aim is not nostalgia. The aim is open-air swimming on this shore again.

From the clifftop the layout reads at a glance - the rectangle of the main pool, the curved boating basin, the pavilion in pale Art Deco lines, the steps cut down to the shore. Beyond it all is the firth, grey or silver or blue depending on the day, with Macduff harbour a mile west and the gannets of Troup Head working the cliffs to the east. Tarlair is one of those places that explains itself only when you see how everything fits together: the cliff, the rock platform, the pools, the sea. The Moray Firth made the geometry possible. The town made the architecture possible. The Friends are now making the return possible.