Hugh Miller's Birthplace Cottage

Cromarty's last thatched cottage, birthplace of the self-taught geologist Hugh Miller, with a museum of his life and fossils.

Hugh Miller (1802–1856) was born in this crow-stepped, thatched cottage on Church Street. His father, a ship's captain, died in a shipwreck when Hugh was five. Miller worked as a stonemason, taught himself geology from the fossils in the Old Red Sandstone along the Cromarty shore, and became a widely read writer and folklorist, as well as a campaigner in the Disruption that split the Church of Scotland in 1843.

The National Trust for Scotland has restored the cottage to how it would have looked in his time. Alongside it, a museum covers his life, writing and fossil collecting. Opening is seasonal, so check before you go. Afterwards you can look for fossils yourself in the rocks along the shore.

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A story
Miller collected the folklore of his hometown along with its fossils. One of the stories he recorded, dating from about 1740, tells of a Cromarty man named John Reid who was granted three wishes by a mermaid. He used one of them to marry the woman he loved, Helen Stuart.