ONE of the most extraordinary Scotsmen of his time was Hugh Miller, who was born in this week of the year 1802. His birth in Cromarty on October 10 that year brought into the world a babe whose childhood would be utterly disrupted by the death of his father, who drowned when his ship foundered in storm when Hugh was just five, and the death of his two sisters a few years later.

He was brought up by his widowed mother, assisted by his two uncles, and had an unusual education for the time in that the uncles often had to teach him themselves as Miller frequently played truant and was finally kicked out of the local school. He was a very diligent student of the Bible, however, which influenced his lifelong Christianity.

Apprenticed to a stonemason, Miller spent 17 years in that trade. He was tall and strong, with flaming red hair and blue eyes and was described by all who saw him as a striking individual, though his work left a legacy of illness such as silicosis – lung fibrosis caused by inhalation of dust containing silica.

While working with stone and captivated by his surroundings in Cromarty, Miller’s great intellectual curiosity led him to make the observations which made him famous in his first career – that of a geologist and palaeontologist. The Scottish Enlightenment was still going full blast, as the names of his close contemporaries show – Thomas Graham the chemist, James Nasmyth the engineer, physicist James David Forbes and Sir James Young Simpson, pioneer of anaesthesia – and a self-taught scientist like Miller was not ignored simply because he had not had a university education.

He could also write, often quite brilliantly, on a range of subjects, and as well as writing for newspapers, he published a book of poetry in 1829. Six years later came the book that gave him initial fame – Scenes and Legends of the North of Scotland.

By that time he had begun to chronicle the Highland Clearances, memorably describing the departure of one emigrant ship, the Cleopatra, in the Inverness Courier on June 22, 1831.

“The Cleopatra, as she swept past the town of Cromarty, was greeted with three cheers by crowds of the inhabitants, and the emigrants returned the salute, but, mingled with the dash of the waves and the murmurs of the breeze, their faint huzzas seemed rather sounds of wailing and lamentation, than of a congratulatory farewell.”

His observation and collection of fossils began during his period as a stonemason, though it was not until much later that he made the realisation of what these fossils meant – that species after species has inhabited this planet and become extinct.

Miller’s silicosis saw him leave stonemasonry in 1834 when he became a bank accountant, and he married his wife Lydia three years later.

Largely because of his increasingly influential writings, Miller was already involved in religious controversies – he was also highly political and could be described as a proto-socialist – within the Church of Scotland, which would lead to his second career.

The Disruption of 1843 was just around the corner when Miller was invited to Edinburgh in 1840 to become editor of The Witness, the newspaper of the evangelical or popular wing that would eventually become the Free Church of Scotland – Miller is said to have coined the name. He remained in that post to the end of his life.

His growing interest in geology and palaeontology saw him bring out two books on the subject in his lifetime, The Old Red Sandstone (1841) and Footprints of the Creator (1850), though perhaps his best book on the subject, The Testimony of the Rocks, was published posthumously, with a passage that summed up his then unpopular belief that the Earth and everything in it and around it was not created by God in six days as the Bible depicts: “Who shall declare what, throughout these long ages, the history of creation has been? We see at wide intervals the mere fragments of successive floras; but know not how what seem the blank interspaces were filled, or how, as extinction overtook in succession one tribe of existences after another, and species, like individuals, yielded to the great law of death, yet other species were brought to the birth and ushered upon the scene, and the chain of being was maintained unbroken.”

Such scientific views were seen to be at odds with his religion, but Miller persevered both as editor of The Witness and as a scientific observer.

He wrote several books, including My Schools and Schoolmaster, his autobiography “of remarkable interest” as he immodestly described it.

Sadly, he began to suffer what we would now call depression, but which to the Victorians was melancholia.

As a result, Hugh Miller shot himself at his home in Edinburgh on Christmas Eve, 1856.

Normally as a suicide he would have been denied a Christian burial, but he was deemed to have acted out of derangement and his funeral was attended by thousands.

Miller is buried with his wife in Grange Cemetery in Edinburgh, and the cottage in Cromarty where he was born is now a museum explaining his important life and works.