Why we love Hugh Miller’s Birthplace

Transcript

Two speakers: Debbie Reid (Visitor Services Manager) and James Ryan (Visitor Services Assistant)

Debbie
My name is Debbie. I am the Visitor Services Manager here at Hugh Miller's Birthplace, which is part of the National Trust for Scotland.
Hugh Miller's Birthplace Cottage is located here in Cromarty in the north of Scotland, and is the birthplace of Hugh Miller, who was a geologist and writer during the 1800s.

Hugh Miller was quite a special man. He was a man of many contradictions.
He was a religious man who studied geology; he was a stonemason and a journalist.
He was a folklorist who loved Scottish legends, but moved to Edinburgh to pursue a career in journalism and the truth.
So, when people come to Hugh Miller's Cottage, they maybe know him for one thing but when they leave, they leave realising he was a man of so many different talents.

He is most well known for finding fossil fish here in Cromarty.
On the foreshore here, there is a group called the Old Red Sandstone, which he was famous for exploring, and in it are fossils of fish from around 350 million years ago.
Because of his finds, people were able to determine that the Earth was millions of years old.

When visitors come, we have both a museum on site as well as the birthplace cottage.
The museum takes you through the whole of Hugh Miller's life, from his early years here in Cromarty where he lived in the birthplace cottage, right through to his work in Edinburgh.
We have some of his renowned collection of fossils on display upstairs as well.
In the museum, we have a couple of really important letters.
We have one from Charles Darwin. Hugh Miller and Charles Darwin were good correspondents during the day.
Unfortunately, Hugh Miller died before the release of Origin of Species, but Darwin's letter talks about some of Miller's work and his work with bivalves.
We also have a letter written by Hugh, which is a Letter from the Scotch People that he wrote trying to establish the Free Church of Scotland.
This was leading up to the Disruption of 1843.

We have two lovely garden spaces.
We have the Garden of Wonders behind the museum with a beautiful ammonite sculpture, and we have this garden here, which is Lydia's Garden, which includes a sculpture sundial, which was sculptured by Hugh Miller himself.
We opened a second-hand bookshop in the cottage, which has been really successful and a wonderful addition to the community here.
We've also got the main shop now in the museum, which has been revamped this year and has all new stock in it.

I have a background in geology -- I have a degree in geology from the University of Glasgow -- so I love this place because it combines my love of geology as well as my passion for working with the National Trust for Scotland.

James
My name is James. I work with the National Trust for Scotland as a Visitor Services Assistant here at Hugh Miller's Birthplace Cottage & Museum in Cromarty.
My favourite thing that we've got here at Hugh Miller's has to be the geological specimens.
I joke that I never grew out of my dinosaur phase!
Always interested in fossils and prehistoric life.
And the fossils that we've got here at Hugh Miller's are just spectacular, be it the ones that he himself collected or the ones we've got in our handling collection, which visitors can get up close and personal with.

We recently just started doing brand new fossil walks.
We are going to be taking visitors onto the shoreline, the very beach that Miller himself made his most important scientific discoveries, so that visitors can find fossils of their own.
Already, the people we've been taking out on the shoreline have been doing really, really great jobs finding fossils.
What's really wonderful is that there is a very high chance that they are the first human beings to see these extinct animals.
Because we're a conservation charity, after a month on display here at the museum, we're going to release them back into the wild and put them back on the beach, to minimise as much damage as possible to the shoreline.

I love Hugh Miller's Birthplace because, although geology is a really big important part, there are so many other stories we've got around here.
We can tell you stories about Victorians, about religious characters.
We can tell you stories about pirates!
With Miller himself, what I love about him, was during an age when science, and particularly geology, was only accessible to high-ranking Victorian gentry, he made sure that the public masses were able to get in on the action.
He made science accessible, thanks to his newspapers and his books.