Scenes and Legends of the North of Scotland: Or the Traditional History of Cromarty

by Hugh Miller

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Genres: Scotland

503 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1835

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Hugh Miller was a self-taught Scottish geologist and writer and folklorist.

Among his geological works are The Old Red Sandstone (1841), The Testimony of the Rocks (1856), and Sketch-book of Popular Geology. Of these books, perhaps The Old Red Sandstone was the best-known. The Old Red Sandstone is still a term used to collectively describe sedimentary rocks deposited as a result of the Caledonian orogeny in the late Silurian, Devonian and earliest part of the Carboniferous period.

Miller held that the Earth was of great age, and that it had been inhabited by many species which had come into being and gone extinct, and that these species were homologous.

For most of 1856, Miller suffered severe headaches and mental distress, and the most probable diagnosis is of psychotic depression. Victorian medicine did not help. He feared that he might harm his wife or children because of persecutory delusions.

Miller committed suicide, shooting himself in the chest with a revolver in his house on Tower Street, Portobello, on the night he had finished checking printers' proofs for his book on Scottish fossil plants and vertebrates, The Testimony of the Rocks. Before his death, he wrote a poem called Strange but True.

A shocked Western world mourned him, and his funeral procession was among the largest in the memory of Edinburgh residents.

He is buried in the Grange Cemetery in Edinburgh.

Miller's death was very tragic, and his life brief, but he left a heritage of new discoveries of several Silurian sea scorpions (the eurypterid genus Hughmilleria was named in his honour), and many Devonian fishes, including several placoderms (the arthrodire Millerosteus also honoured him), described in his popular books. Though he had no academic credentials, he is today considered one of Scotland's premier palaeontologists.

There is a bust of Hugh Miller in the Hall of Heroes at the Wallace Monument in Stirling. His home in Cromarty is open as a geological museum, with specimens collected in the immediate area; a week-end event at the site in 2008 was part of celebrations marking the bicentenary of the Geological Society of London.

The Hugh Miller Trail starts at a small car park on a minor road just past Eathie Mains, about 3 miles (4.8 km) south of Cromarty, and leads about 1 mile (1.6 km) down a steep slope through woodland to the foreshore at Eathie Haven on the Moray Firth, where Miller began collecting fossils. It was here that he found his first fossil ammonite, in Jurassic rocks. The haven was originally a salmon fishing station, and a former fishermen's bothy, open to the public, has a display board about the geology of the area and Miller's fossil discoveries.

The BP-operated Miller oilfield in the North Sea was named after Hugh Miller.

Reviews

[Noreen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hugh Miller was a contemporary of Charles Dickens in the Victorian Era. The scenes and stories form background settings and beliefs of Cromarty Scotland circa 1830s. The scenes leave an impression of a hard land to make a living, where bad things seem happen randomly. Scotland was a hard land, where a tough hard people learned to survive. Pg 54: It is a curious fact, that we meet among the Protestants of Scotland with more marked traces in of the paganism of their earlier, than of the priest of their later ancestors. ....The saint days of the priest have in consequence been long since forgotten— the festival of the Druid still survive. (Halloween)

Pg 326 It is well for human happiness in the ruder ages, that cowardice is rarely or never the characteristic of a people who have either no laws or laws that cannot protect them; for, in the more unsettled stages of society, personal courage is a necessary policy, and no one is less safe than he who attempts to escape danger by running away.

Pg 225 a chapter describing cholera epidemics and quarantines.

[Sir Robbiethehoo · Rating 2 out of 5]

Did not finish.

Made it to chapter eight of thirty two. For anyone who has picked this book up, they will realise that this is quite the accomplishment.

Hugh Miller warns in the preface that he is a dull man but sadly does not relate the fullness of his dullness. This book was rather horrific. The main problem is he is far too wordy and rambles, rambles a lot and details little.

A rating of two stars for the quarter or so of the book I managed to read is due to the fact that in-between the mindless guff there was some very pleasant and interesting reminisces and revelations but unfortunately these insights are lost within screeds of waffle and piffle.

I think to get full enjoyment of this book, pick and choose your chapters wisely, lest you should be bored to death with an over-wordy and tedious to the extreme writing style.

I found the book disappointing. If it had cut the crap considerably there’s every chance that this would be a lot more readable.

[Trunatrschild · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am sure this is a good book, but WAY too hard for me to read in the Scottish cant of the turn of the 1900's. You can't get much more authentic and I am spoiled and like it in English at regular sized print. If it was printed in regular size, you probably couldn't hold the book. But if you want authenticity. That's it.