We are absolutely delighted to have won the British Museum’s Marsh Award for Museum Learning Scotland for our Cromarty Built on Slavery audio tour.

These awards are for an outstanding contribution to engaging museum audiences, so particular thanks to Nicole Bontemps and David Alston for their brilliant presentation on this amazing audio tour, and to Liz Broumley for enabling its development.

The tour is based on David Alston’s ground breaking study “Slaves and Highlanders” (his book Slaves and Highlanders: Silenced Histories of Scotland and the Caribbean – was the Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year 2022). In the tour David recounts the links between Cromarty and Slavery, from the plantation owners who received record sums in compensation when slavery was abolished in 1833, to managers and overseers of various plantations (including those of John Gladstone, William Gladstone’s father), to tradesmen who earned their living on the plantations and trained their own slaves to be skilled craftsmen. It looks at the role of the hemp factory and the fishing industry in supporting the slave-based economy, often at the expense of Scottish workers in Cromarty. It also tells the story of an iconic painting by the Scottish Artist Sir Henry Raeburn, which now hangs in the Louvre, Paris, and has its origins with a family living in Cromarty – to learn more listen to the tour.

You can access the tour from the Smartify app which can be downloaded to your phone so you can follow the tour from the comfort of your armchair or walking around the different sites of Cromarty: Built on Slavery.