The story of Cromartyshire, Scotland’s stupidest county

The shattered plate.

You may not have heard about this – I’ve kept it pretty quiet – but my new book is out next month. It’s called A History of the World in 47 Borders: The Stories Behind the Lines on Our Maps, it contains 47 essays starting with Ancient Egypt and ending with the edge of space, and at one point it didn’t contain 47 essays at all, but more like 52. Some of them, I ended up merging; others, thanks to the clash between a limited page count and my own inability to shut up, ended up on the cutting room floor.

I’m going to run some of the off-cuts in the run up to publication day, in a, “Hey, buy my book!” kind of way, so here’s one now – on the truncated and geographically baffling existence of Cromartyshire….

The difficulty we’re going to have with this story is that almost everyone in it is called George Mackenzie. There’s the hero of our story, Sir George Mackenzie, who among other things managed to get himself ennobled as the 1st Earl of Cromartie; there was his grandson the 3rd Earl of Cromartie, George Mackenzie, who betrayed his king and lost the lot. Then there’s the 1st Earl’s cousin Sir George Mackenzie, whose writing about the first earl we’re going to quote, and the 3rd Earl’s cousin, the 4th Baronet, who is also called Sir George Mackenzie, but is only relevant in so far as he’s on the other side of the conflict that screws everything up for the 3rd Earl.

Last of all, there’s the 7th Baronet, Sir George Steuart Mackenzie, who is not three baronets down the line from the 4th because he holds a different baronetcy (Coul, rather than Tarbat), and who is so distantly related to the others that he might as well not be related at all, but who wrote a very helpful book about the counties we’re concerned with. Aside from all those there are also a trio of Sir George Mackenzies who are baronets of Darien, who thankfully don’t come into our story; and a dizzying array of Sir Alexander Mackenzies and Sir Roderick Mackenzies, too. Never mind borders, someone should investigate the severe name drought that was clearly underway in 18th century Scotland.

Anyway. The key George Mackenzie, for our purposes, was born in Fife in 1630, scion of an ancient highland clan which had spent much of the previous couple of centuries gradually increasing its titles and landholdings through the clever tactic of repeatedly fighting, victoriously, on the side of the crown. George’s branch of the family, alas, was not the one with the good titles – his father was a mere baronet, a rank so lowly it doesn’t even count as a peer, just one step above us poor normal people – so to some extent he had to make his own luck. 

Helpfully, though, this was a great time in Scottish history to do just that. The world of his adolescence was dominated by the War of the Three Kingdoms – the conflict known more commonly, if less accurately, as the English Civil War – and he was still a teenager in January 1649, when parliamentary forces took King Charles I’s head off his shoulders. This, at risk of armchair psychology, may well have explained his lifelong interest in politics, and also why he was, in the words of Sir George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh – who I think was his second cousin, but frankly who the hell knows – a “passionate cavalier”, joining uprisings on behalf of the executed king’s son before fleeing into exile.

He returned in 1660, once the monarchy was restored, and the son he had fought for had been crowned as King Charles II. Even better: his former military commander was now running Scotland, which made a useful launching pad for a political career. He spent the next thirty years climbing up, and occasionally slipping back down, the greasy pole, becoming at various points MP for Ross, a Lord of Session (a fancy sort of judge), Lord Justice General of Scotland, and finally, in 1685, Viscount of Tarbat, a peer at last. Except for the decade and a half he had spent in disgrace for misleading both the king and the parliament, it had all gone swimmingly. 

It was around that time, though, that he did something baffling. In 1682 he had acquired the land in the Black Isle peninsula which made up the hereditary mediaeval sheriffdom of Cromarty; in 1685, he got an act passed in parliament to bring his assorted lands in neighbouring Ross-shire – and those of his brother and mother-in-law – under the control of that sheriffdom. Sheriffdoms in Scotland were pretty much equivalent to shire counties in England: in essence, Sir George had decided that all his lands should comprise their own county, and used his political power to get it. The result, according to yet another Sir George Mackenzie – the 7th baronet, writing over a century later – was that Cromarty-shire grew 15 times bigger and was worth three times the rent. 

Creating a new county for ego reasons was not quite as ridiculous as it first sounds: the early modern years had seen a flurry of new Scottish counties created, especially in the Highlands, which comprised something like a quarter of Scotland but all of which had, until recently, been called Inverness-shire. What was ridiculous, though, is that Sir George’s lands were nowhere near each other. Cromarty-shire consisted of a couple of dozen patches of land, ranging from the 117,000 acre Coigach (around 474km² – almost respectable) to the southern tenth of Gruinard Island which, at 52 acres, was the size of a large garden. It looked like somebody had dropped a plate. 

Ross-shire (in orange) and Cromartyshire (in blue). Image: Wikishire.

Exactly why Sir George wanted this is hard to reconstruct at this distance. He already had power, land and titles: perhaps the creation of Cromarty-shire, of which he became the first earl in 1703, was an attempt to tie the three together in a conveniently heritable package. What is clear is that Sir George really, really wanted it: after the act was repealed when it was found it had covered some land he didn’t even own, he got it amended and passed again.

If he was motivated by the last vestiges of the feudal view of the world in which land and titles meant power, though, his timing was impeccably terrible. Just four years after he received his earldom, the Act of Union was passed, and Scotland joined England in the new United Kingdom. Suddenly Cromartyshire no longer even had a whole MP in the new combined parliament at Westminster: instead it was an “alternating constituency”, its MP taking it in turns with his neighbour in the almost equally tiny county of Nairnshire to take his seat. 

Cromarty-shire was a disaster as a county in other ways, too. As the 18th century went on, the Scottish shires ceased to be mere units of judicial authority and became fully fledged local authorities. The scattered plate was predictably a nightmare to govern on its own, so in hardly any time at all everybody ceased bothering even to try. By the mid 18th century, it was sharing a sheriff with Ross-shire, the neighbouring shire which surrounded most of it; the 1801 census only counted the population of the original land on the Black Isle as the Shire of Cromarty, and counted all its exclaves as part of Ross; ten years later, the authorities couldn’t even be bothered with that, and treated them as a single unit known as Ross & Cromarty. Today, an organisation called the Association of British Counties spends its time denying any and all changes to county boundaries that have taken place since the time Queen Victoria was last moving about, a view of the world that means almost every major city in Great Britain is divided between two or more counties. Even that has given up trying to separate Cromarty from Ross. In every sense that matters, Cromartyshire failed.

So did the Mackenzies. In 1745, Sir George’s grandson, George Mackenzie, 3rd Earl of Cromartie, joined the doomed Jacobite rebellion; he was sentenced to death for his treason, but conditionally pardoned and forfeited his titles. He died in penury. Another of Sir George’s grandsons, Sir George Mackenzie, the MP for Cromartyshire, stayed loyal; but by then he was bankrupt and had already sold his estates in Cromarty. By the mid 1760s, nothing remained of the 1st Earl’s legacy – except some particularly stupid lines on a map.

If you enjoyed that, and would like more of that sort of thing, why not pre-order the book? Here, if you’re wondering what didn’t end up on the cutting room floor, are the complete contents, complete with page numbers…

List of Maps xi

Introduction 1

PART ONE: HISTORIES

The Unification of Upper and Lower Egypt 11

The Great Wall of China and the Border as Unifier 15

Why is Europe Not a Peninsula in Asia? 22

The Roman Limes and the Power of the Periphery 28

The Legacies of Charlemagne 36

The Borders of Great Britain 44

Of Feudalism, Marquises, Margraves and Marcher Lords 52

The Open Borders Policies of Genghis Khan 58

Spain and Portugal Carve up the World 66

Holy, Roman and an Empire 72

Britain, Ireland and the Invention of Cartographic 

Colonialism 80

The Much Misunderstood Mason–Dixon Line 87

The Local Government Reforms of Emperor Napoleon I 96

The American Invasion of Mexico 103

The Schleswig-Holstein Business 108

‘. . . Where No White Man Ever Trod’ 114

The Sudan–Uganda Border Commission 122

European Nationalism and the United States of 

Greater Austria 127

Britain and France Carve up the Middle East 135

The Partition of Ulster 142

The Partition of India 147

The Iron Curtain and the Division of Berlin 156

PART TWO: LEGACIES

Königsberg/Kaliningrad, Eastern Germany/Western Russia 165

The Strange Case of Bir Tawil 172

The Dangers of Gardening in the Korean DMZ 177

China’s Nine-dash Line and Its Discontents 185

The Uncertain Borders Between Israel and Palestine 192

The Siamese Twin Towns of Baarle-Hertog and 

Baarle-Nassau 200

The US–Canada Border, and the Trouble with Straight Lines 205

Some Places Which Aren’t Switzerland 211

Some Notes on Microstates 217

City Limits 223

The Curse of Suburbia and the Borders of Detroit 230

Washington, DC and the Square Between the States 236

Borders from a Land Down Under 243

Some Accidental Invasions 251

Costa Rica, Nicaragua and the ‘Google Maps War’ 256

The Mapmaker’s Dilemma 261

PART THREE: EXTERNALITIES

A Brief History of the Prime Meridian 267

Some Notes on Time Zones 275

A Brief History of the International Date Line 282

Of Maritime Boundaries and the Law of the Sea 288

Some Notes on Landlocked Countries 295

How the World Froze Territorial Claims in Antarctica 299

The Other, Bigger, More Musical Europe 307

Boundaries in the Air 313

The Final Frontier 318

Conclusion: The End of the Line 325

Sources and Further Reading 329

Acknowledgements 345

Index 347

The book is out at the end of April. If you like the sound it, you can buy it here. Alternatively…