Hugh Miller

Hugh Miller must rate as one of the most extraordinary minds Scotland has produced. He rose, if not from absolute poverty, certainly from a modest background, to become both a specialist in the field of geology and a generalist in the wider literary world, covering, as writer and editor, subjects as diverse as poetry, folklore, science, education, religion, history and travel. In his working life he was a stonemason, banking accountant, journalist, editor, lecturer and defender of Christianity against the evolutionists. By the time of his tragic suicide in 1856, Miller's prodigious output had made him among the best known of Victorian literary figures, admired by Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens and John Ruskin. First published in 1835, and extensively enlarged and revised in his lifetime, this book was the Cromarty stonemason's first important book, and is a monument to his pioneering work as a folklorist and social historian. His gifts as a storyteller are never shown to better effect than in this book, whether recounting legends of ghosts, fairies, mermaids and witches, or telling the true tales of Ross and Cromarty's history - from the eccentric life of Sir Thomas Urquhart to the cholera epidemics of the 1830s.