The town of Cromarty, an old sea port and tourist trap in the far north of Scotland, has more than its fair share of graveyards. Cemeteries cover the hill that rises gently behind the town, including one in the grounds of a Gaelic chapel, built by the local laird in 1784 to help absorb an influx of Gaelic speakers displaced into Cromarty by the Highland Clearances. The chapel is now ruined and roofless. Many of the gravestones are themselves buried beneath weeds and vines.
Today, the Cromarty Firth is another kind of cemetery. Since the arrival of the North Sea oil industry to Scotland in the 1970s, the Firth has been used for the maintenance and storage of oil rigs. Disused rigs are sometimes parked there seemingly indefinitely, giving the Firth the appearance – in the words of one local SNP councillor – of an “oil rig graveyard”. Last year, as the pandemic plunged the industry into crisis, it filled up with 17 platforms, forming a queue of huge, skeletal hulks looming over Cromarty itself and stretching away into the sea haze towards Invergordon in the west.
Content from our partners
