Hugh Miller's Birthplace Cottage & Museum

Hugh Miller, the stonemason who taught himself geology on the Cromarty shore and became one of Victorian Scotland's best-known writers, folklorists and fossil hunters, was born in 1802 in this thatched cottage built by his great-grandfather, a sea captain with a piratical reputation. The cottage is furnished as an early 1800s home, with a sundial pedestal carved by Miller in the Lydia Garden named for his wife, while Miller House next door is the museum: three floors of his fossil finds, manuscripts, shepherd's plaid and mason's mallet, with Miller's Yard, a Garden of Wonders about the natural world, behind. Both are cared for by the National Trust for Scotland. Reviewers say the museum is deceptively big, the staff and volunteers exceptional and the cottage atmospheric. Tips from visitors: do not miss the gardens at the rear, the old courthouse next door is free and worth combining, and dogs on leads are welcome in the garden and courtyard but not indoors.