Walk through Dingwall today and you would never guess that the town was once a major medieval port. The topography has changed. The Cromarty Firth used to reach right up to the High Street, and Dingwall was a hub of foreign trade and customs collection, exporting hides and salt fish, importing wine and timber. Alexander II made it a royal burgh in 1226, the seat of the Earls of Ross. James IV renewed its royal charter in 1497. Then, slowly, the land silted up and the harbour pulled back. Today the firth's western shore lies a mile or so east of the town. The Dingwall Canal - the shortest in Britain, also locally called the River Peffery - is what remains of the port. The town's population is now about 5,491. Across that long retreat from the sea, Dingwall has stayed the administrative centre of Easter Ross.

Three miles west of the town rises Knockfarrel, a hill topped by an Iron Age vitrified fort whose stone walls were melted by some ancient fire - whether deliberately fortified by glassy heat or destroyed by attackers nobody is sure. In the early Middle Ages Dingwall Castle, established in the eleventh century, was reputed to be the largest castle north of Stirling. The tradition that Macbeth was born in Dingwall - he was Thane of Ross, and possibly Mormaer here before he became King of Alba in 1040 - is one of those tantalising claims that historians cannot quite confirm and locals will not quite let go of. The Eagle Stone, a Pictish-era carved monolith on Mitchell Hill, is older than any of the certainties: a hooded figure and a beast carved into stone that already had centuries on it when the Vikings arrived.

After George Mackenzie, 1st Earl of Cromartie, died in 1717, his family built a 51-foot obelisk over his grave near the parish church of St Clement. It subsided. By the nineteenth century it was leaning so badly it had earned a nickname - the Leaning Tower of Dingwall - and was eventually demolished and replaced with a smaller copy. The Dingwall Town Hall, built in 1745, still stands. In 1845 a much darker piece of history came out of the area. James Gillanders of Highfield Cottage, factor for the Robertson estate while his employer served with the British Army in Australia, oversaw the mass eviction of the crofting tenants of Glencalvie in Ross-shire - one of the most brutal episodes of the Highland Clearances. A Gaelic-language poem denouncing Gillanders for his cruelty was eventually published anonymously in a Canadian Gaelic newspaper in Nova Scotia. It is believed to be the only Gaelic-language source documenting the Glencalvie evictions, an act of literary witness preserved by exile. On 6 August 1904 the town unveiled a pale pink granite memorial to the Seaforth Highlanders killed in the Boer War.

Modern Dingwall is the home of Ross County Football Club, which won promotion to the Scottish Premier League in 2012 and won the Scottish League Cup in 2016 by beating Hibernian 2-1 - a remarkable record for a town of five thousand people. Kate Forbes, the Deputy First Minister of Scotland, was born here and went to school here. So was Sir Hector MacDonald, the soldier-general nicknamed Fighting Mac, son of a Rootfield crofter who rose from the ranks to command a brigade. Willie Logan, who founded the airline Loganair, was a Dingwall civil engineer. Strangest of all is Colin Calder, who left Dingwall for South America in the 1880s and on 24 December 1889 founded the football club Club Atletico Rosario Central in Argentina - the team that would later produce Lionel Messi's home crowd. A Highland town that lost its sea has scattered its sons across the world, and given a small Argentine city the football club its greatest player would inherit by birth.