Below is a brief report, authored by James Scott Petre on the ‘The Sixteenth Century in the Highlands’, a one-day conference organised in Inverness on 5 July 2024 with the support of SSNS through a Publication and Conference Grant.

The event went very well with an audience of around 60 listening to 10 speakers talking on a variety of relevant subjects. These ranged from clan studies, discussions of new source material, a rather overlooked and early industry (the slate industry), archaeological finds at Finlaggan likely attesting activity there on the visit of James V, witchcraft, ecclesiastical reform, and Spanish interventions towards the end of the period. Chaired by Prof Ewen Cameron of Edinburgh University, there were lively question and answer sessions. The papers delivered were mostly on subjects not previously published, so these were new initiatives bringing fresh insights into activity in the time and place. The success of the conference has encouraged the SH&IHR to go ahead with its plan to have the day’s proceedings fully written up and published, in the course of 2025. Consequently, the resulting volume may be able to take a place, albeit in not quite the same format or approach, alongside those volumes published by the Inverness Field Club in the last century. More to the point, it will contribute to what we are learning about the sixteenth century in the Highlands by looking at matters which have, perhaps, been of only marginal interest before, and bring these studies more into the mainstream of future historical overviews.

•  James Scott Petre, summer 2024