About this objectCromarty Courthouse has one of the largest collections Russian lead seals in the country. This is because Cromarty was a centre for the manufacture of hemp sacking and rope during the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century.
The raw materials were imported from ports in Russia, including St Petersburg, and the Baltic, particularly from Riga. The bales of raw hemp were graded and lead seals were attached with their dates in a Cyrillic script, to be discarded later.
The hemp itself was spun and woven in the hemp factory, build in the late eighteenth century, as part of the economic investment in Cromarty by George Ross, a wealthy Anglo-Scots businessman who also built Cromarty Courthouse. The woven material was made into sacking and used in the transatlantic trade to bag and port coffee and cotton grown on the plantations of the West Indies and the Americas. It's an example of how seemingly innocent industrial processes could support a vast trade built on the enslavement of others.
