Artisans and Craft Production in Nineteenth-Century Scotland

A University of Edinburgh online exhibition about Scottish artisans, their work and working lives between 1780 and 1914.

Buildings

Portrait of Hugh Miller, Geologist, Writer and Stonemason ca. 1845

© Scottish National Portrait Gallery

Portrait of Hugh Miller, Geologist, Writer and Stonemason ca.1845

Hugh Miller (1802-1856) was a celebrated geologist and writer who began his working life as a stonemason in the small coastal town of Cromarty in northeast Scotland. Son of a seafaring man, with uncles who were variously employed in trades ranging from shoemaker to harness-maker, cart wright to stonemason, Hugh was well educated in the local school, but had no ambition to use his education to better his status. He was apprenticed to an uncle as a stonemason in Cromarty, with work mostly comprising quarrying, building and stone cutting. After three years he commenced as a self-employed journeyman working across the Highlands on farm and house building projects during the summer months, going home to his mother’s house in Cromarty for the winter for study and writing in an age when every craft community had ‘its sprinkling of intelligent, book-consulting mechanics and tradesfolk.’

He travelled south to Edinburgh during the building boom of 1824-5, getting employment on a mansion house project at Niddry as one of a party of sixteen masons, plus apprentices and labourers. But the stone hewing was dusty and undermined his health, so he went home again to convalesce before turning his hand to gravestone carving.

After nearly twenty years as a stonemason, he retrained as bank accountant in Linlithgow and then took up journalism in the 1840s as the editor of the Free Church newspaper The Witness, based in Edinburgh. During all this time he pursued his studies in geology, natural history and myths and legends of Scotland, publishing on these subjects to great acclaim. He also wrote about his life as a stonemason and on the workingmen and women he encountered.

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Workmen at Balnagown Castle, 1880s<br />

© Tain and District Museum's Trust

Workmen at Balnagown Castle, 1880s

This photograph taken by William Smith shows workman carrying out repairs or alterations to the exterior of Balnagown Castle, Kildary, near Tain.  Artisans were employed to build new buildings in the nineteenth-century but their skills were also needed to repair and maintain Scotland’s historic structures. The hand-tools in this photograph suggest that the men were slaters or carpenters, both were skilled trades taught through the nineteenth-century apprenticeship system. The men’s ages appear to range from twenty to forty. The man standing at the highest point, though not the most senior in years, was likely the foreman, his status indicated by his starched white collar. Almost all the workmen wear waistcoats and cloth caps, the standard form of dress for skilled manual workers at the time. Some estates employed their own carpenters and road-menders but large-scale building works were most often contracted out to local companies so it wasn't unusual for ‘Notices to Builders’ to be posted in Scottish newspapers advertising for a single firm or contractor to coordinate the work of all the masons, carpenters and slaters required to complete a specific building.

Balnagown Castle is the historic home of the Clan Ross chieftains located in the Ross and Cromarty region of the Highlands. The building originates from the thirteenth century though by the time these workmen were employed it had been renovated and expanded by several owners.  The rectangular ground plan of the building dates from the 1760s but the Castle was further developed from the mid-nineteenth century. Charles Henry Augustus Frederick Lockhart Ross (1872-1842) was an eccentric character and the inventor of the Ross Rifle.  He was the owner of Balnagown in the 1880s and so the likely commissioner of these workmen.

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Buildings