Join us at The Sennachie Festival and 2025 AGM

The Old Brewery, Cromarty

23rd-24th May 2025

The Sennachie Festival is a celebration of storytelling, folklore, music & poetry, organised by The Friends of Hugh Miller, in part to celebrate 190 years of Miller's Scenes and Legends of the North of Scotland (first published in 1835).

With musical performances from Gillian Fleetwood & C Duncan, Lori Watson & Duncan Lyall, poetry from Cáit O'Neill McCullagh & Gill Shaw Writes, and conversations with renowned authors including James Robertson and Elsa Panciroli, there will be something for everyone during the weekend! We would love to see you there! 

For further details and tickets for all events, including full weekend passes, please visit: https://www.eventbrite.com/o/109616363681

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The Friends of Hugh Miller is a small charity set up to support Hugh Miller's Birthplace Cottage and Museum in Cromarty on the Black Isle, where the Victorian geologist Hugh Miller was born in 1802. We aim to promote, celebrate and research Miller's legacy, both by encouraging visitors to the Museum and by hosting regular events to boost knowledge and understanding of Miller, his family and his life. 

The Friends of Hugh Miller welcome anyone with an interest in Miller, and/or in Scottish geology or history more broadly, to join us. We are a small, welcoming and enthusiastic group run entirely by volunteers. We have an AGM every spring in Miller's hometown of Cromarty, to which all are welcome to attend. We run events once or twice a year (sometimes more!), and we produce a regular newsletter crammed full of fascinating articles and new research on Hugh Miller and related topics. To join us, please complete our online form - donations are also most welcome! 

Larissa Reid

Hugh Miller (1802-1856) was humble, determined, intelligent and entirely self-taught in his passion – geology. He strode around our country in the mid-Victorian era, at times covering 30 to 40 miles per day, in search of treasure. Fossilized, ancient treasure. He gathered specimens of ancient fish, of reptiles, of long-extinct sea creatures, and pieced them together like a jigsaw – often literally. His finds would be scattered through layers of rock and distributed along shorelines and embankments, quarries and offshore islands, and he would somehow find each tiny piece – a scale here, a bone there, each fossil ghost a fragment of the story - and he would painstakingly reconstruct their past shapes and forms and puzzle over their ancient world.

Miller was more than 'just' a geologist, however. He was a prolific writer, with numerous books and essays to his name. He was editor of The Witness newspaper - the paper of the Free Church of Scotland, which had a vast readership. He was also a campaigner for social justice, and his writings contain extensive and valuable observations of historical value.