Taylor, Michael A

Torrens, H. S.

English

National Museums Scotland Research Repository

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Taylor, Michael A (2003) Hugh Miller and the Coalheugh Well at Cromarty, Hugh’s News. 
Newsletter of the Friends of Hugh Miller, NO.12; WIN 2011 pp. 3-4.   
 
 
 
http://repository.nms.ac.uk/1189  
 
 
Deposited on: 27 May 2014 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
NMS Repository – Research publications by staff of the National Museums Scotland 
 
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Winter 2011    Hugh’s News      3 
 
 
The well waters are ‘enveloped by a 
ferruginous coagulum’ 
LANDMARK SERIES, No 2 
Some of our members have suggested that we publish a series of articles about historic sites associated with 
Miller. We did in fact begin this process with an article about the reopening of the East Kirk in the previous 
issue (No 11). We continue with a piece about a local landmark, well known to residents but little noticed by 
the wider world. 
Hugh Miller and the Coalheugh Well at Cromarty 
By Michael Taylor (National Museums Scotland and University of Leicester) 
and Hugh Torrens (University of Keele)  
Cromarty’s architecture is rightly famous, but the Coalheugh Well of Miller’s 
The Old Red Sandstone has been, we think, unjustly neglected. It is a rare, 
and possibly unique, upstanding survival of a failed ‘pre-scientific’ coal 
prospecting venture from before the time of William Smith (1769-1839).  
Location 
The Well, more correctly an aquifer source, lies below the site of St Regulus's 
chapel, where Hugh and Lydia Miller's eldest child Eliza is buried. It is easily 
accessible where the Reeds Path Loop to the water processing plant crosses 
the Old Chapel Burn debouching from the 'den' or wooded ravine in the old 
sea-cliff.  
The wellhead is a mossy masonry dome about chest-high to an adult, with an 
outlet on one side: plainly there is enough pressure to produce a head of at 
least a metre or so above ground, giving 'one of the finest specimens of a true 
Artesian well which I have anywhere seen’ (Miller 1841, p. 181).  
Then as now, ‘[t]he waters are not strongly tinctured, - a consequence, perhaps, of their great abundance; but 
we may see every pebble and stalk in their course enveloped by a ferruginous coagulum, resembling burnt 
sienna, that has probably been disengaged from the dark red sandstone below, which is known to owe its 
colour to the oxide of iron’ (p. 182).  
The colour, and the traditional depth of the bore (below), indeed suggest that the water is passing through Old 
Red Sandstone rather than the overlying Ice Ages and modern deposits. Like Miller, we can infer the 
underlying geology of Old Red Sandstone nodular mudstones and shales (including Miller’s famous fossil fish 
bed), from the outcrops in the stream bed, and along the nearby beach.  
Origin 
Perhaps based on oral tradition, Miller ascribed the Well to George Mackenzie, first Earl of Cromartie (1630-
1714) – probably wrongly, David Alston notes in his history My little town of Cromarty. But whoever the 17th 
or 18th century landowner was, he or his advisors, as Miller plausibly suggested (1841, pp. 180-181) were 
misled by abundant plant remains and occasional bitumen in the grey shales in the stream bed ‘into the belief 
that coal might be found ... He accordingly brought miners from the south, and set them to bore for coal in the 
gorge of the ravine'.  
But this was before the last years of the 18th and first years of the 19th century when William Smith developed 
his key insights, firstly that sedimentary rocks occurred in a recognisable geological sequence, secondly that 
rocks of the same type (such as shale) could occur at many positions in that sequence (so that rock type was 
no guide to position), and thirdly that the rocks of a particular stratigraphical position could be reliably 
recognised only by their constituent fossils.  
Smith’s insight helped distinguish the true coal measures from barren rocks elsewhere in the sequence which 
looked superficially similar, for instance in containing bits of coal-like lignite (fossil wood). Given the huge, 
and growing, importance of coal, this was of immediate, and enormous, use, in guiding what should at once 
have become – but too often did not - a scientifically based search for coal. There was then too great a gap 
between what scientists knew and what coal miners did.  
Before Smith’s insights, the Cromarty prospectors were blind to the fossil evidence, even the very notion,  that 
they were dealing with rocks below the Carboniferous Coal Measures. As Miller put it, 'there might be some 
possibility of their penetrating to the central fire, but none whatever of their ever reaching a vein of coal.' 
 
Winter 2011    Hugh’s News      4 
 
 
Dr Taylor discusses the characteristics of the well on site with 
delegates to the Hugh Miller: Local Hero geology conference 
(2008) 
‘A hand-operated rig of the kind likely 
to have been employed at the 
Coalheugh’. 
But 'they were prevented from ascertaining, by actual experience, the utter 
barrenness of the formation ... They had bored to a considerable depth, when, 
on withdrawing the kind of augre [auger] used for the purpose, a bolt of water, 
which occupied the whole diameter of the bore, came rushing after like the jet 
of a fountain, and the work was prosecuted no further; for,  as steam-engines 
were not yet invented, no pit could have been wrought with so large a stream 
issuing into it; and as the volume was evidently restricted by the size of the 
bore, it was impossible to say how much greater a stream the source might have 
supplied. 
‘ The spring still continues to flow towards the sea between its double row of 
cresses, at the rate of about a hogshead [variable measure – usually by then 
52.5 gallons, just under 200 litres] per minute, - a rate considerably diminished, 
it is said, from its earlier volume, by some obstruction in the bore. … the 
recollection of it is … preserved by tradition … and by the name of the well, 
which is still known as the well of the coal-heugh, - the old Scotch name for a coal-pit’ (pp. 181-182). Heuch 
or heugh is Scots for a pit or mine - but also for a cliff or high bank (Concise Scots Dictionary), and is therefore 
doubly appropriate here, whatever the original intention.  David Alston kindly informs us that the modern 
local pronunciation of Coalheugh is ‘callie-shoch’.  
Other trials for coal would be carried out in the district, even after Smith’s work, for, as well as the Old Red 
Sandstone, the Jurassic black shales at Eathie were also temptingly lignite-bearing. One wonders how often the 
same mistakes were made. But we know very little about them  except for trials carried out against Miller’s 
advice at Eathie about 1852 (traces of at least one shaft are visible north of the bothy).  
David Alston kindly points out that the Well was later used to supplement  the unsatisfactory town supply 
through an iron pipe run from the well around 1859-63, while, more recently, in The Cromarty We Knew, Eric 
Malcolm recalls the tap on the garden wall of Clunes House, “spring water piped from the Collie well …  
always cold, but it tasted most strongly of iron ... very handy after a hot game of tennis  iron water or not.” 
Today, however, the water flows freely to the burn and thence to the sea.  
A final comment 
The Well is a very special reminder of the economic importance of geology, complementing the oil platforms 
so often parked within sight in the Firth. 
As so often, Miller (1841, p. 183) gives an admirable last word: 
'… geology, in a peculiar manner, supplies to the intellect an exercise of … [an] ennobling character. But it 
has also its cash value. The time and money squandered in Great Britain alone in searching for coal in districts 
where the well-informed geologist could have at once pronounced the search hopeless, would much more 
than cover the expense at which geological research has been prosecuted throughout the world.' 
 
Acknowledgements 
We are grateful to Lyall Anderson for discussion of local geology, Alison 
Morrison-Low for advice on hogsheads, and David Alston and John 
Nightingale for local information. We gratefully acknowledge an earlier 
version in the International Commission for the History of Geology 
Newsletter issue 35 (published in 2003, pages 25-26), and permission by 
the then editor David Oldroyd and current editor Barry Cooper for this 
republication with update and revision. 
Further reading 
MILLER, H. 1841. The Old Red Sandstone, or, New walks in an old field. 
John Johnstone, Edinburgh. 
TORRENS, H. S. 2003. William Smith (1769-1839) and the search for 
English raw materials: some parallels with Hugh Miller and Scotland, pp. 
137-155 in BORLEY, L. (ed.) 2003. Celebrating the life and times of 
Hugh Miller. Scotland in the early 19th century … Cromarty Arts Trust, 
Cromarty, etc. 
 
 


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