Opening for the season from Easter to October 2024! Daily Wed - Sat 10:00am-4:00pm

What has been happening hereabouts over the last few millennia? 

We have prehistoric grave goods and finds, even a sample from the vitrified hillfort at Knockfarrel between Dingwall and Strathpeffer. In one front window are the two sculptured stones from Conan Bridge, a small carved cross and a large (half-tonne!) cross-slab from somewhere between the 7th and 10th centuries. Along with the symbol stone in St Clements churchyard, Dingwall, they show Pictish activity in the area.

The placename Dingwall is significant, indicating the place of assembly for free men in Viking or Norse times. How long this lasted or the impact on local people is impossible to gauge from surviving material. While some people in the past have associated Thorfin the Mighty, a jarl of Orkney, with connections to Dingwall, this too remains unproven. Dingwall was on the frontier – of the Norse earls, of the Earls of Moray in the 11th century, and then gradually pulled into the Scottish kingdom.

In our other front window is the tall Mercat Cross, not cross-shaped (although there’s a tang at the top that once supported … what?). It stood for hundreds of years at the market cross-roads where the High Street and Castle Street cross, very likely erected to celebrate one of the Royal charters granted to the burgh, perhaps the 1226 one from Alexander II. Alexander granted Fearchar mac an tSagairt the Earldom of Ross in the same year so the town’s powers could balance the Earl’s. 

Since then wars, revolutions, famine and the Black Death have swept over the town and some of the ordinary fragments of history have found a place here in the Town House built for the Dingwall Burgh Council in the 1730s and used until the council was subsumed into the wider Highland local authority in 1975.

Dingwall’s history goes on all the time: you are part of it; come inside and look!