25/08/2026
There were flagstone works at Harrow and the harbour was one of those talked about in the post below.
🪨 If you have ever walked down a Victorian street in London, Sydney or Buenos Aires, there is a fair chance you were walking on Caithness.
The far north east corner of Scotland sits on a bed of Old Red Sandstone that does something unusual. It splits. Not roughly, but into enormous flat sheets, some of them two inches thick and the size of a table, near enough true and level straight out of the ground.
From the 1820s that quirk of geology turned into an industry. The engineer Joseph Mitchell tested the stone, specified it for paving the streets of Inverness, and the local laird James Traill opened a quarry and sawmill at Castlehill near Castletown. Within a generation Caithness was cutting pavement for the world. 🏴
At its height the trade employed over a thousand people and shipped tens of thousands of tonnes a year out of small harbours built for the purpose. Caithness flags went to London and Edinburgh, to Boston, to Sydney, to South America. Men worked in open quarries in the teeth of the Pentland Firth wind, levering, splitting, dressing and stacking, and their wives and children counted and loaded.
Then concrete arrived, and it ended almost as quickly as it began.
But Caithness has always been its own place. Norse rule left it with a Scots dialect rather than Gaelic, and it is famously described as the lowlands beyond the Highlands, flat and green and windswept, more like Orkney than like the mountains just over the county line. Flagstone is everywhere there: field fences are not walls at all but thin slabs stood on end in rows, a whole landscape fenced in stone.
If your people were Caithness folk, this was very likely their trade or their neighbour's trade.
They never got their names on anything. They just quietly paved half the world.
