Inverness & the Moray Firth

• It is the Highland capital. Inverness is the administrative and commercial centre of the Highlands and one of Scotland's fastest-growing urban areas.
• It became a city in 2000, as part of the millennium celebrations.
• Columba came here. Adomnán's Life of Columba describes the saint visiting the Pictish king Bridei near Inverness in the 560s, and confronting a "beast" in the River Ness, the earliest written ancestor of the Loch Ness Monster story.
• The Caledonian Canal ends here. Thomas Telford's canal, opened on 24 October 1822, links Inverness to Fort William through the Great Glen. Its sea lock at Clachnaharry, on the soft mud of the Beauly Firth, took nine years of work to secure.
• Dolphins live in the firth. The Moray Firth has a resident population of bottlenose dolphins, numbering around 200, among the most northerly in the world.
• Culloden lies just outside. The battle of 16 April 1746 ended the Jacobite rising, about five miles east of the town.
• It was a seafaring firth. In the nineteenth century the firth's ports traded across the North Sea and beyond, and the shipyards of Kingston and Garmouth at the mouth of the Spey launched more than 600 ships.

Inverness has been a centre of power since Pictish times. Medieval kings made it a royal burgh, and its castle commanded the crossing of the Ness. The town was burned and fought over repeatedly, including by Robert the Bruce and later the Jacobites. The present castle, built in 1836 as a court house, stands on the old castle site above the river and is being redeveloped as a visitor attraction.

Inverness grew as a hub. The Caledonian Canal, built under Thomas Telford between 1803 and 1822, joined the Moray Firth to the west coast. The Highland Railway reached the town in the 1850s and 1860s, and the A9 and the airport now make it the gateway to the north.

Telford's Inverness

established Headquarters of the Highland works. From 1803 Inverness was the base for both of the government's great Highland schemes, the Caledonian Canal and the network of Highland roads and bridges, with Telford as engineer to each. The general superintendent of the roads eventually lived in Telford Street, which runs from the town towards the canal entrance. Joseph Mitchell, who grew up there as the son of that superintendent, later remembered the town of his youth as "a very poor and primitive place", with a few good buildings in the centre and thatched hovels around them.

established The Clachnaharry sea lock. The canal's eastern end was the hardest to start. The Beauly Firth is so shallow that the entrance had to be carried about 400 yards beyond the usual high-water mark, and an iron bar pushed into the mud found it 55 feet deep. Dredging was impossible. Telford and his resident superintendent, Matthew Davidson, piled huge quantities of stone and clay on the site and left it to sink, squeezing the mud out until a solid mound remained. The lock was then dug into it, on an inverted masonry arch that was in place by September 1805. John Rickman, secretary to the canal commissioners, congratulated Davidson on conquering "the grand difficulty" in late 1811. Today a marina sits just inland of the sea locks, with no trace of the struggle.

established Matthew Davidson. Davidson came from Telford's home valley of Eskdale and had worked with him on the Ellesmere Canal. He ran the eastern end of the canal from 1804 until he died at his house by the canal at Clachnaharry on 8 February 1819. His letters to his sons, quoted by Julian Glover in Man of Iron (2017), are full of loathing for the Highlands. His son James, who had worked as Telford's clerk, succeeded him and was still at Inverness when the canal opened.

established Opening day. The canal opened on 24 October 1822, before it was finished and shallower than planned. A steamboat left Inverness with the band of the local militia playing, was joined on the way by Henry Bell's Comet, and reached Fort William for a dinner that ran until four in the morning. On the return trip the boat reached Inverness just after midnight. Telford was not there; he had arranged to be in Wales.

established Moray Firth harbours. Telford also worked on harbours round the firth for the Highland commissioners and others. Glover's list of his works includes Burghead (1808–09), Fortrose (1813–17), Avoch (1813–15) and Nairn (1816–25).

The Moray Firth's bottlenose dolphins are among Scotland's most famous wildlife. The narrow strait at Chanonry Point, between Fortrose and Fort George, is one of the best places in Britain to see them from the shore. The firth also hosts seals, seabirds and, offshore, some of Scotland's largest wind farms.

Today the Moray Firth is better known for its dolphins than its shipping. In the nineteenth century, though, its southern shore was lined with working ports, and its merchants traded from the Baltic to Hong Kong. Ian Hustwick's history of the firth's ships and trade, built from Customs registers, Lloyd's surveys and ships' ledgers, describes ports from Banff, Portsoy and Cullen in the east through Garmouth, Lossiemouth, Burghead, Findhorn and Nairn to Inverness, and across the water at Cromarty, Invergordon, Portmahomack and Littleferry.

The trade was old. A charter of 1393 from Thomas Dunbar, Earl of Moray, gave the burgesses of Elgin the right to ship wool, cloth "and al vthir thyngis" out of "wre hafine of Spee", the mouth of the Spey; the original survives in the Moray archives at Forres. By the seventeenth century the firth was sending timber, malt, corn and salmon to the Continent, and Scots merchants settled in Baltic ports acted as agents for their countrymen at home.

By the 1800s the pattern was settled. Herring and grain went out; coal came in from Northumberland and Fife; flax, hemp, tar, masts and timber came from Norway and Russia. Inverness imported Russian hemp and flax for its linen trade, while Banff took Norwegian timber for its boatyards. A profitable round trip ran herring to the Baltic, Baltic grain to north-east England, and coal home. Stettin, the distribution centre for Scottish herring in northern Europe, took about 15,000 barrels of British herring in 1824 and more than 100,000 a year by the late 1840s. Hustwick suggests the firth's masters found the Low German of the Baltic ports easier than might be expected, because it had much in common with the dialect of north-east Scotland.

Ships were built all round the coast, often on nothing more than a firm beach, but the great centre was Speymouth. In 1786 two Hull timber merchants, Ralph Dodsworth and William Osbourne, bought Glenmore Forest from the Duke of Gordon, floated its pines down the Spey, and brought English shipwrights north to build ships of a size never before seen on the firth. The village that grew up around their yard was named Kingston, after Kingston upon Hull. In April 1795 the yard launched a 700-ton ship built wholly of Spey fir, reported as the largest ever built in Scotland north of Leith. The Duke of Gordon, who was present, asked to change her name at the last moment, and she was launched as the Princess of Wales. The shipwrights trained local men, who set up yards of their own. Over about a century Kingston and Garmouth launched more than 600 ships: nearly half of all the ships built on the firth in the nineteenth century, and about 80 percent of those over 100 tons.

These were small ships by Clyde standards, mostly schooners and brigantines, but they went everywhere. The 209-ton schooner Garmouth sailed from London to Hong Kong between 1875 and 1877, called in the West Indies in 1879, and went missing after leaving Banff that November. Ownership was spread through the community in shares (the Merchant Shipping Act of 1854 fixed the number at 64 per ship), held by shipmasters, builders, farmers, merchants and widows, with the local bank agent often lending the money. Boys went to sea at 12 or 13 and could command a ship by 22 or 23, and many Moray Firth schools taught navigation from the eighteenth century.

The end came with iron. The Spey was hard to manage: its mouth moved year by year, and the "Muckle Spate" of August 1829 swept away a dozen houses at Kingston and left the old harbour at Garmouth unsafe. But the decisive change was that larger iron and steel ships, built where coal and iron were close at hand, were cheaper to run. From the 1840s weekly steamers linked Inverness with Leith, calling at Cromarty, Invergordon, Nairn, Burghead, Lossiemouth and Banff, and the railways that followed took much of the coastal trade. The last ship built at Kingston, the schooner Janet Storm, was launched in 1890 and was lost with all hands off the Bell Rock two years later. Some of the trade was sadder still. Of the cattle steamers from Littleferry, Hustwick writes that "the saddest cargoes must have been the emigrants who left the land in their thousands hoping for a better life in Canada and Australia".

established Inverness has always stood between two languages. The historical geographer Charles Withers, in Gaelic in Scotland 1698–1981 (1984), quotes a report of 1656 that in the town "ane halfe of the people understand not one another", and Thomas Kirk's observation in 1677 that most residents spoke only Gaelic, "except some of the better sort that can speak Scottish". In 1641 the presbytery created a separate Gaelic charge, the "third charge", by enlarging the choir of the High Church. A count made around 1704 found about 900 people over fourteen who spoke both languages, forty who spoke only English, and about 3,000, most of them in the countryside, who understood no English.

established By the mid-eighteenth century the town was turning to English, though as Edmund Burt noted in his Letters from a Gentleman in the North of Scotland (published 1754), "within less than a Mile of the Town, there are few who speak any English at all". Samuel Johnson wrote in 1775 that Highlanders who spoke English "commonly speak it well", and travellers claimed that English was nowhere better pronounced than "in the line of the forts and particularly at Inverness". In 1835 the minister reported that by the rising generation "English is almost universally preferred, especially in the town of Inverness, where many of them are wholly ignorant of Gaelic", although the Gaelic church still had sittings for 1,200. In the 1881 census 23 per cent of the townspeople spoke Gaelic. The Gaelic Society of Inverness, founded in 1871, led the campaign that put a Gaelic question into that census.

established Along the coast to the east lay the edge of the Gàidhealtachd. Johnson wrote: "At Nairn we may fix the verge of the Highlands; for here I first saw peat fires, and first heard the Erse language." In 1882 the Ordnance Gazetteer placed the Highland line across Nairn's High Street, at about Rose Street.

• The earliest written "Loch Ness Monster" story, in Adomnán's Life of Columba, actually takes place in the River Ness.
• The mud at the canal entrance at Clachnaharry was 55 feet deep. The engineers built the ground up with stone and clay rather than dig through it.
• Fort George, across the firth, is one of the most impressive eighteenth-century fortresses in Europe and is still an active army base.
• The village of Kingston at the mouth of the Spey is named after Kingston upon Hull, home of the English company that founded its shipyard in 1786.
• Because the 1854 Merchant Shipping Act required a certificated mate on any ship of 100 tons or more, firth owners often had ships built at 99 tons.
• Portgordon's harbour wall has a hole through it. It was built to let the tide scour out silt, but carters used it to drive horses into the harbour at low tide to load ships.
• The Clyde shipbuilders Alexander Stephen and Sons traced their roots to a yard at Burghead, where the Stephen family was building ships by about 1750.

• Dolphin numbers are survey estimates.
• Macbeth links are largely literary and traditional.
• The maritime history rests mainly on one local study (Hustwick, 1994), whose author descended from a Kingston shipbuilding family. Its figures come from Customs and Lloyd's records, but the registers are incomplete.

• Culloden
• Fort George
• Urquhart Castle & Loch Ness
• The Loch Ness Monster