Working in the Castle

By Derek Flyn

Inverness Castle was the Sheriff Court in 1967, when at age 21 I was promoted from Edinburgh to be clerk of court at Portree. My boss was the Sheriff Clerk in Inverness. He would ask me to come to work with him in the Castle to check and balance the books, for he was responsible for receiving payment of the fines imposed by the Sheriff in the court. We would use a mechanical adding machine and work on until the books were perfectly balanced, sometimes late into the night. On certain nights, the junior pipe band run by the janitor practiced loudly in the entrance hall, in a space later used for the second courtroom. I went on to take a law degree and qualified as a Solicitor, joined a firm in Inverness, and appeared for clients in the same court.

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