Alexander Nimmo's Inverness Survey and Journal, 1806

Alexander Nimmo was an engineer and rector of Inverness Academy in Scotland. Here his travelogue of the wild region of Inverness in Scotland is published for the first time. In 1806 the Commission for Highland Roads and Bridges sent Nimmo on a fact-finding mission to survey the boundary of Inverness-shire with the adjacent counties. This journal of his 'perambulation' constitutes detailed observations on the people and places visited and describes the natural environment. It offers a valuable and interesting first-hand account of the shire and the Highlands and insight into Nimmo's personal transformation from a schoolmaster to one of the pathbreaking engineers of his century. Nimmo resigned his Rector's position in 1811 and took up a post with the Commission for the Bogs of Ireland. He completed unsurpassed surveys, maps and reports on the isolated regions of Iveragh peninsula of Co. Kerry and Connemara, Co. Galway. For his achievements he was made a Member of both the Royal Irish Academy and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. This Inverness journal is edited and annotated by zoologist Noel P. Wilkins. It is accompanied by three essays that bring commentaries on politics and unrest in Scotland at the time, cartography, and the Inverness Academy. Reproduced within are two rare maps of the territory.