The Factor's House

25/05/2026

A beautiful night at the bottom of the garden.

04/05/2026

It's not all Bacon and Eggs for breakfast.

03/05/2026

A healthy way to start your Sunday.

07/04/2026

The sun rising over the Sutors this morning

29/03/2026

The ever changing spring weather in Cromarty this weekend , didn't manage to capture the horizontal sleet though 😂.

18/03/2026

We get great sunsets in Cromarty

01/10/2025

Love this !

Did the Loch Ness Monster visit Invergordon?

In September 1898, several newspapers reported on a strange “sea serpent” said to have been seen in the Cromarty Firth. The first sighting came in the second week of September, when a few men sitting on Cromarty pier around 10 a.m. noticed movement in the water. At first, they assumed it was a whale but soon realised it was something stranger.

One of the men, John Ross, later told a reporter that the creature was “greenish, with a flat head about a yard long” which rose almost two feet out of the water, swaying from side to side. He believed it had a long body beneath the surface, as its passage left “a line of foam” in the water. The men watched it for over ten minutes before it disappeared up the firth.

Later that same day the creature was sighted again, this time at Invergordon, where it swam in the bay for over two hours. Nearly two hundred people gathered to watch, and at one point it came so close to the shore that, according to one report, “Mr Macandie, Ship Hotel, touched it with his umbrella.”

George Urquhart, one of the first to arrive, described the scene:
“I calculate that it was 25 feet long. The head was broad and flat, like that of a halibut… I observed two large fins below the head. One was suddenly lifted out of the water. It was green and, I think, hairy. David Mackenzie had a dog with him, and he picked it up in his arms and ran up the beach shouting, ‘It’s a speerit, it’s a speerit.’ I saw parts of the long body rising out of the water in loops, three or four feet apart.”

Another witness, Mr Macleod, believed it to be thirty feet in length and seven or eight feet round. He thought it resembled a giant eel, though its head was much broader. He even made a sketch and attempted to catch it with hooks and rope, but no one would risk going out in a boat.

With six signed witness statements, the reporter concluded that “Invergordon was treated to a sight of something out of the ordinary.” Yet he also asked why no one had tried to capture it—or, as he put it, “Why was a bullet not put through that flat, imprudently obtrusive head?”

29/09/2025

We have some pretty amazing sunrises in Cromarty.

23/09/2025

Not many people have Queen Mary at the bottom of the garden.

22/09/2025

Probably not your usual breakfast