Qualla: Tomnahurich Cemetery

Tomnahurich Cemetery: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pampuco, CC BY-SA 4.0. The name has been mistranslated for so long that the wrong meaning has almost won. Tomnahurich - tom na h-iubhraich - means "hill of the yew wood" in Scottish Gaelic, as the scholar William J. Watson nailed down in 1926 in his Celtic Place-Names of Scotland. He is buried up there himself now, under a fine monument, surrounded by the trees he wrote about. But for generations people in Inverness preferred the other story: that Tomnahurich was the hill of the sithichean, the fairies, and that anyone who fell asleep on its summit risked waking a hundred years later or not at all. Watson was technically correct. The fairies, in folk memory, were never quite evicted.

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Image: Pampuco | CC BY-SA 4.0

Tomnahurich Cemetery: The Hill Before the Graves

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Derek Brown, CC BY-SA 2.0. For most of its existence the hill was not a cemetery at all. It rises sharply out of the flat Ness Valley between the Caledonian Canal and the river, 70 metres high with a topographic prominence of 53 - small as hills go, but unmistakable on a plain. Before the Victorians turned...

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Image: Derek Brown | CC BY-SA 2.0

Tomnahurich Cemetery: Big Angus and the Fairies

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris Morgan, CC BY-SA 2.0. Even though Watson the philologist was right about the yews, the folk imagination kept circling back to the fairies. There is a Gaelic tale, Aonghas Mor Thom na h-Iubhraich agus na Sithichean - "Big Angus of Tomnahurich and the Fairies" - in which the hero either bargains with th...

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Image: Chris Morgan | CC BY-SA 2.0

Tomnahurich Cemetery: The Victorian Necropolis

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Reading Tom from Reading, UK, CC BY 2.0. In the second half of the nineteenth century the Inverness Cemetery Company, a joint-stock venture in the Victorian fashion, bought the hill and turned it into the city's principal burial ground. It opened in 1864. The design is attributed to the Glasgow art teacher Charles Heath...

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Image: Reading Tom from Reading, UK | CC BY 2.0

Tomnahurich Cemetery: What the Summit Sees

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Craig Wallace, CC BY-SA 2.0. The view is the point, or one of them. From the top of Tomnahurich the city lies spread out below: the spires of Inverness, the curve of the river, the green wedge of the Black Isle pushing north into the Moray Firth, and on a clear day the Monadhliath rising blue in the south. B...

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Image: Craig Wallace | CC BY-SA 2.0