Born 1802 Died 1856

Geologist and man of letters born in Cromarty. Having lost his father at sea at the age of 5, he had a rebellious school career in various schools, and was apprenticed as a stonemason at the age of 16. Working with stone for the next 17 years, he developed an interest in fossils, and he devoted the winter months to reading, writing and natural history. In 1829 he published Poems Written in the Leisure Hours of a Journeyman Mason, followed by Scenes and Legends of the North of Scotland (1835). He contributed to John Mackay Wilson’s Tales of the Borders (1834-40) and to Chamber’s Journal.

He married the daughter of an Inverness businessman and became a bank accountant for a timer (1834-9), but when he became involved in the controversy over Church appointments that led to the Disruption of the Church of Scotland (1843) with a ferocious open Letter to Lord Broughton(1839), he was invited to Edinburgh to start The Witness, the newspaper of the anti-patronage ‘Evangelicals’ within the Church of Scotland and became the outstanding journalist of the Disruption. At the same time he wrote a series of geological articles in The Witness, later collected as The Old Red Sandstone (1841). In 1841 he visited England for the first time and wrote First Impressions of England (1847). His My Schools and Schoolmasters (1854) is the story of his youth.

A pioneer of popular science books., he combated the Darwinian evolution theory with Footprints of the Creator (185), The Testimony of the Rocks (1857), and Sketchbook of Popular Geology (published posthumously, 1859)

Worn out by illness and overwork, he shot himself.

The old thatched cottage at Cromarty in which he was born is now a museum run by the National Trust for Scotland.

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