Asked what it was like to farm beside the sea, Bill Campbell of Newton Farm had the following thoughts which focus less on the maritime conditions and rather more on the underlying geology of Cromarty.

We came to Newton Farm from Caithness in 1945 when I was ten years old.

We’re near the sea but it’s an inland arm of the sea so it’s fairly sheltered, maybe not like if you were facing the north – out on the Aberdeenshire or Banffshire coast where you’re more exposed. Farmers there would be more aware of the sea.

The only advantage here of being close to the sea is that you’re at sea level; the higher you go, the more you’re into the snow and frost level. Apart from that, we’re not bothered with sea fogs: Aberdeenshire, Banffshire, they can get fogs for days on end that really affect the harvest. Arable farming in that area is curtailed by maybe a week of misty, foggy weather. If you’re harvesting, for example, you can’t do anything because fog is damp. Foggy day: no sunshine, no wind. But for us, we’ve probably got a kind climate here in the Inner Moray Firth. The Gulf Stream goes right round the north and there’s an eddy, a big whirlpool in the Moray Firth and we get a slight bit of warmth from that. But honestly, as far as farming near the sea goes, at least where we are situated, I can’t see much advantage apart from altitude, or lack of, and the fact that it keeps a little snow away.

We would be all arable here if every field lent itself to that job. But because the land nearest the sea is undulating and steep in places it’s not all that suitable for machinery – hence the cattle and sheep. There is something peculiar to the east coast: Sutherland-shire, the Inner Moray Firth area – cobalt deficiency. Now what causes that, how it’s in one particular area and not in another, I do not know. Before the days that they really discovered what it was, it was dreadful. You’d get the shepherd throwing in the towel and leaving because the sheep were just melting away; it was called ‘pine’, and you didn’t know what was wrong with them. We called them ‘piners’, like a runt, and that was to do with lack of cobalt.

We’ve got very poor-draining land here. You’ve got sort of plough depth and then we’re sitting on clay that’s almost impervious to water. So you get a very wet spell, the plough depth fills up with water and there’s nowhere for it to go. So it makes the crops quite sick or it makes our job difficult to do. If we were on lighter, sandy soil then it would be easier for arable farming but it could dry out in a very dry summer. We’re up from the raised beach, so we’re really sitting on red clay.  Probably the red stone of this house would have been clay many thousands of years ago, and then it would have been consolidated, compacted. If you dig deep enough you come to red sandstone.

As far as I know there was a quarry down below Newton here, down below Neilston, the old cottage. There’s no sign of it now but you do see red sandstone and occasional off-cuts. The barges used to come in, the tide went down, they loaded the sandstone and then when the tide came in again they were floated out and they went to Fort George. So some of the stone for the building of Fort George in the 1760s came from just below this farm.

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