Flags Around the World

by Mike Clark

The Rev George Traill was minister of the parish of Dunnet, in Caithness, and in 1758 his wife bore him a son.  Little did they realise that the offspring they had produced would change the shape and economics of the county so radically.

J T Calder, in his History of Caithness, enthuses . . “Mr Traill laboured with unwearied intensity as a practical improver, and set a notable example to all the other landed gentlemen in the county.”.

Prior to James Traill’s involvement, Caithness flagstone had been used for generations, and indeed centuries. It was quarried small-scale by individual crofters and farmers, for use as sheep fanks, fences (flag dykes), water tanks, gateposts and roof tiles. These crofters were merely following a tradition of their ancestors in utilising such a valuable natural resource.

Early Neolithic settlers found that the local stone split easily, and used it to build chambered cairns. In the Bronze Age, flag was used for hut circle foundations and burial cists. The Iron Age saw the building of great Brochs with this material, and when the Vikings encroached upon these northerly lands, they used the flagstone to build their lookout towers and castles.

James Traill studied law at Edinburgh, and in 1788 he returned to Caithness as sheriff-depute. He bought the House of Castlehill, by Castletown, and at that time it was a bare, desolate place, totally at the mercy of all the elements thrown at it by the Pentland Firth.

Although his house is gone, ravaged by fire in 1967, the sheltering trees around Castlehill today are the legacy of his foresight.

And James Traill it was who recognised the potential of Caithness flagstone. Some tentative cargoes had been shipped to Aberdeen in the late 1790’s, but Traill commenced serious quarrying in 1824, and his first export left Castlehill Harbour in 1825.

First, of course, he had to construct the harbour, and for this task he employed James Bremner of Keiss. It goes without saying that the harbour was built entirely from flagstone, and it is a testament to the durability of the material that it still stands, intact and in use, today.

In 1877, the Caithness Flagstone Quarrying Company recorded customers in Bombay, Calcutta, Dunedin, Melbourne and Sydney. And indeed, a meat factory in Argentina was floored with flags. Closer to home, flagstone paved the concourse of Euston Station.

The Castlehill quarry was adjacent to the harbour, and at one time extended for almost a mile through the present village. Castletown developed from a tiny hamlet to a significant planned village under the auspices of James Traill.

At it’s peak, his quarrying enterprise was employing 500 men, and shipping 35,000 tons per year. His benevolent offer of free flag trimmings for house-building saw quarry-workers expanding the village at some speed.

In 1861, a steam engine was introduced to drive the cutting saws and other quarry machinery. Prior to that, the industry depended on a windmill to pump water out of the quarry, into a dam, and thence power the equipment by a waterwheel. The old windmill tower still stands, built of flagstone, of course, and is a scheduled monument.

The word flagstone comes from the Norse flaga, meaning a slab. This useful property to split readily into thin slices arises from the fact that some 370 million years ago the north of Scotland lay beneath Lake Orcadie. Layers of sediment formed in the bed of this great lake, but periodically the lake dried up, and the dry spells give the stone its “laminated” form which allows easy splitting.

The beds of stone tend to be almost horizontal, and flags were split away using wedges and levers. They were loaded onto trolleys and taken to the cutting yard. Cutting and trimming involved the use of the water (and later steam) driven saws, with water for lubrication and coarse sand as an abrasive. Mechanisation meant several stones could be cut at the same time, using a bank of saws, but it was still a slow process.

The finished flags were taken to the harbour and stacked on the quayside, awaiting hand-loading onto the small ships which would transport them to world wide destinations.

The demise of the industry was brought about partly by the introduction of concrete as a cheap alternative, and also by the sharp rise in labour and transport costs after the Great War. The Castlehill flagstone works closed in the 1920’s.

By that time, though, Sheriff Traill was gone – he died in 1843 aged 85, and was succeeded by his son George, who subsequently became MP for the county.

The Castlehill Quarry was used for landfill for many years, and eventually reinstated to agricultural use. In 1996, however, the site was planted as a Community Woodland, and within it lurk sculptures by a number of local artists – all done in flagstone, of course!

© Mike Clark 2003

Published in Best Of British magazine March 2004