At its peak it produced oatmeal, bruised oats and hashed oats for an area extending from Montrose in the south to Barras and Catterline in the north and inland to Laurencekirk and Fordoun.
The artist Joan Eardley lived in the village in the 1950s up until her death in 1963.
In the early 1950s while convalescing from mumps Eardley was taken by a friend to visit Catterline, a small fishing village near Stonehaven, then in Kincardineshire (now Aberdeenshire).