There's something about herring that's both ancient and modern. Scotland has a long history as a major player in the global industry and herring is part of our culinary legacy. At one point Scottish ports from the West Coast to the East processed millions of them each year and yet I've often wondered why it is that, bar the odd upmarket restaurant menu, we see so little of it today.

Isn't it ironic that Scottish herring is now so rare that it's regarded as a treat? Part of the reason is that the season is so short, running roughly from July until September. But even Glasgow, once very much into herring due to the influx of fishing folk from the Highlands and islands, seems to have lost its taste for it. Time, then, for a revival, methinks.

As Donald S Murray points out in his fascinating book Herring Tales, an average of between two and three million barrels a year stood in the harbours of Scotland alone in the years before the First World War. They thronged the North Atlantic, and could be found off the shores of places as far apart as Iceland, the Netherlands, Ireland, the United States and Southern Greenland.

The British industry lasted for at least 900 years. In the far north of Scotland, the populations of Orkney and Shetland are recorded as having traded in salt fish from early times. The industry seems to have begun in Great Yarmouth: in 1067 the town already had a herring fair. It is noted as having 24 fishermen and three salthouses in the Domesday Book of 1086.

Later, between the 11th and 12th centuries, it became the task of the Cinque Ports – Hastings, New Romney, Hythe, Dover and Sandwich – to regulate the industry.

All this is evidence, he says, of how the herring journeys huge distances in its 10-year lifetime, the 30cm-long fish travellling at about 6km an hour through the sea (this is, however, relatively slow compared to certain other species. A 50cm cod swims at 8km an hour, a mackerel manages 10km and the sea trout reaches the heady speed of 12km an hour).

Whatever the reason for their movements, it's a fact that ports like Oban, Mallaig, Ullapool and Stornoway used to throng with men and women who came there to "net their share of that bright and shining prey, battling the sometimes stormy seas often found at that time of year".

Between May and August fishing would begin in Orkney and Shetland before moving south to the Moray Firth and beyond. Much of the fishing would take place in ports like Lerwick, Scalloway, Kirkwall, Scrabster and Wick one week; the next it might be Nairn, Burghead and Lossiemouth. From September to November, the vessels journeyed to the east coast of England to ports like Hull, Scarborough, Grimsby and further south yet to Yarmouth and Lowestoft.

Yet there were subtle differences between the herring caught outside Wick and those found off Lowestoft, spawned in different locations by the fish who had visited these coastlines even though they look the same to the naked eye.

People made a good living from herring, and not only from fishing and gutting and packing them: in 1928 my husband's paternal grandfather James Gunn, a grocer, followed the herring boats from his native Caithness round to Mallaig in the north-west of Scotland to open the village's first licensed grocers shop at East Bay (the building still exists, though it's now been converted into a house). My husband's aunt, now 97, remembers the fleets of herring boats that crowded the picturesque bay. As a youngster she would watch apprehensively as her nimble teenage big brother, my husband's late father, leapt from boat to boat, from deck to deck, delivering brown paper parcels of groceries from their dad's shop directly to the crews on board.

Her experience of the herring boats could not compare to the mostly awful lifestyle of the herring lassies or "gutting quines" – the girls who also followed the fishing boats to gut and pack the fish at a speed of 60 fish a minute or one a second. Murray quotes James Wilson's A Voyage Round the Coasts of Scotland and the Isles in 1841, in which he notes the "sheer quantities of blood and fish slime upon the women" and declares: "From what we witnessed of their process, we doubt not if they were arranged in battle array they would have gained the day at Waterloo".

The seagulls would whirl over the women, leaving them with excrement-stained clothes for days on end. The Factories Acts of the 19th and early 20th centuries didn't yet appear to apply to the herring girls and there were no restrictions on how many hours they were expected to work. They started in the early morning when the fish landed from the boats, bending over barrels until the work was done – even if that meant midnight and beyond. The huts in which they lived had no lighting, heating or water so they could not wash, and they slept together in a single bed, wrapped in a blanket to keep out the cold.

It's a fascinating book and worth a read. The modern herring industry is very much alive and kicking in other countries like Norway and Denmark. What a shame Scotland, and especially the west of Scotland, can't - or won't - follow suit.

Could our current love-in with Scandi cuisine help kick-start the industry here?

* Herring Tales, by Donald S Murray, is published by Bloomsbury on September 10, 2015, at £16.99.