Publications

My Little Town of Cromarty: the history of a northern Scottish town (Birlinn)

This book is a history of the small town of Cromarty, north of Inverness at the tip of the Black Isle peninsula. Although it has less than 750 inhabitants, Cromarty is viewed by its residents as a town rather than a village, which reflects the settlement’s beginnings as a royal burgh and its days as a leading port for the northern Highlands.

Cromarty is first recorded in the thirteenth century as both a royal burgh and a small sheriffdom. The town’s varied history has included periods of marked prosperity ¬– in the early 1700s, based on a thriving trade in grain and salt fish; in the 1760s and ’70s under an improving laird who, among other innovations, built Britain’s largest hemp factory here; and especially from the 1790s to the 1830s, when some believed that it might replace Inverness as the principal commercial centre of the Highlands. A disastrous decline followed, however, with the failure of the town’s trade as it was bypassed by the expanding network of sea, road and rail transport. Although the Cromarty Firth was an important naval base during WW1, the decline continued until the 1970s, when North Sea oil and improved communications brought a revival. This study considers Cromarty in the wider context of the northern Highlands and sheds new light on the area’s social and economic history.

‘David Alston is one of those most valuable people: a historian committed to local history and the possessor of a startling intellect, most of which has been devoted to the town . . . His enthusiasm for Cromarty fills the room as soon as he walks in.’
                – Charlie Connelly, Attention All Shipping

Very Rapid and Splendid Fortunes’: Highland Scots in Berbice (Guyana) in the early nineteenth century

Preface to Michael A Taylor, Hugh Miller: Stonemason, Geologist, Writer (Edinburgh, 2007)

‘The Social Context: Cromarty and the Highlands in the early 19th century’ in Hugh Miller in Context  (Cromarty Arts Trust, 2002)

Ross and Cromarty: A Historical Guide (Birlinn, 1999)

Poems in Northwords magazine, 1997

The Resolis Riot (Cromarty Courthouse, 1996)

‘The fallen meteor: Hugh Miller and local tradition’ in Hugh Miller and the Controversies of Victorian Science (Oxford University Press, 1996)

‘The Cromarty hemp factory’ in Review of Scottish Culture, 1992