Old travel Blog photograph of a Flagstone Quarry near Halkirk, Caithness, Scotland. Flagstone was probably used by our early inhabitants for building houses and stone walls and would have been obtained at outcrops where the rock broke through to the surface and required little or no quarrying. Despite this early use of flag, the first attempt to obtain the stone on a commercial basis was made of Castlehill on the shores of Dunnet Bay to the north of the village of Halkirk, then known as Olrig, when in the summer of 1793 several cargoes of stone were shipped to Aberdeen. The instigator of this new industry was James Traill, who lived from 1758 to 1843 and was for a time Sheriff of the County. He moved from Rattar to Castlehill House in 1824 and set about organising the flagstone quarrying. In the following year regular shipments of flags were begun to ports all over the United Kingdom and as the fame of this most unusual material spread, cargoes were sent as far afield as South Africa. Indeed a famous meat factory in the Argentine was floored with Caithness flags. The word flag comes from the Old Norse flaga, meaning a slab.
All photographs are copyright of Sandy Stevenson, Tour Scotland, and may not be used without permission.
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