Hello Mary
Try this site: www.spatial-literacy.org and click on 'search for a surname' to see the distribution of Gullons in 1881 and 1998.
Don't want to be a wet blanket re the Armada theory, but if everyone in Scotland (especially the North-east, where I come from) who think an ancestor was a shipwrecked sailor from the Armada is right, there would have been nobody left in Spain! I think I'm right in saying that the big shipwreck happened when they hit bad weather off the coast of Ireland.
What about trade? Any reason why Spanish people would to-and-fro, and eventually settle in Fife?
Trish
Well said, Trish. This Armada story is one of those urban myths that won't lie down and die. If you read 19th c. histories of fishing towns on the east coast of Scotland, they nearly all have a founding myth of this kind. The people of Buckhaven in Fife are supposed to be Danish, for one. The fact is that at various periods in the past, some of the crofter-fishermen in the coastal parishes decided to concentrate on the fishing and give up farming. In my native parish of Kilrenny in Fife, the laird John Beaton of Balfour built the harbour of Skinfasthaven in the 1540s and the fishing village of Silverdyke or Cellardyke grew up around it. The surnames of the fishing population are also found among the landward population, but obviously through time the fisherfolk became so distinctive in their lifestyle, dialect, etc. that they came to be seen as foreign interlopers.
There is no question that ships of the Spanish Armada were wrecked off Scotland and the Diary of James Melville, the minister of Anstruther Easter, describes how some Spanish sailors were looked after by the people of that particular Fife town before being sent on their way, but there is absolutely no evidence of any of these foreign sailors being encouraged to stay in Scotland and settle there. Apart from anything else, the fact that they were Catholics in newly-Presbyterian Scotland would have counted against them. Where a supposedly Spanish name crops up, there is usually a boring explanation for it; e.g. it used to be said that the Gosman family of the Anstruther/Kilrenny area were descended from a Spanish Guzmán, but Gosman or 'Goose man' is an old Scottish and English surname found here long before the Spanish Armada was ever thought of.
Harry