Martin and Miller

©Calum Davidson

Whenever I walk the shores of Cromarty, I cannot help seeing them through the eyes of Hugh Miller, having become immersed in his sea stories almost as soon as my wife Frieda and I arrived here fifteen years ago to look after his museum.

And I thrill to see how our young people enjoy many of the same adventures as did the boy daredevil Hugh. I wish I too had been born here, and spent my youth delving the caves and ravines, taking a birl through the woods, and going for a swim and sail and fish in these waters in their wondrous setting.

I see Hugh, guided by his Uncle Sandy, scrambling over the pebbles on the ebb tide, spotting garnets, learning to recognise and name the cuttle fish, limpets, sea-mice, crabs and couries. I see him trapped in the Doocot Cave with his friend Findlay and getting a cheer at school for his doggerel verse about it.

Young Kieran from our neighbours sometimes brings gleaming mackerel to our door, fresh-caught same as Hugh landing his supper off the Sutors with wife Lydia in his yawl in the 1830s.

It is such a delight when fossil-hunters young and old bring in to the museum their own finds of scraps of ammonites and belemnites in the Cromarty deposits. Occasionally they have fragments of those extraordinary black-scaled Devonian creatures which Hugh carried back to the very same building and made world-famous 170-odd years ago.

Hugh’s legends dramatise any stroll through today’s quiet Cromarty. I cannot pass ‘The Retreat’ in Church Street without thinking of that awful smuggler tale in which a father accidentally kills his own son during a brawl with customs officers. Out at sea, there could be old salmon fisher Hossack on his way to barter his catch for gin from the noble smuggler Lord Byron (the poet’s half-mad, rogue uncle).

Now and again a minke pays a call, minding you of the whale once hooked on “Nanny Fizzle’s crook,” which eventually beached in the Beauly Firth.

Then, on the way to ‘The Hundred Steps’, I see Captain Reid vanquishing the mermaid to win the hand of his sweetheart. Look out to sea again, and there see the herring shoals which once “lumped” in a solid silver drove from shore to shore.

Many are Hugh’s tales of shipwreck in the days of sail, including of course that of his own father, and these legends too bear dramatic witness to the ever-present menace of storm we can see for ourselves to this day, though we are no longer exposed to the same dangers.

Hugh gives us history as well as legend, inviting us to visualise the changes wrought by the march of time. As we walk on the still steadily eroding shore paths, we can try to imagine what the medieval burgh, now buried under the sands, looked like; and to envision the cornfields and clumps of wood which in the 17th century surrounded the Clach Malloch stone.

For me, heritage has to be a living force, illuminating our past, informing us while, today, we make new history as we go along, history which will fill out a picture for those who come after us. In this book, we continue a great tradition begun by Hugh Miller.

Walking with Hugh – by Martin Gostwick (Manager, Hugh Miller Museum)