James Macpherson, who would convince half of literary Europe that he had discovered the lost works of an ancient Scottish bard named Ossian, learned to write in Inverness's old burgh grammar school. The school's lineage runs back further than his fraud—back to 1223, when Dominican friars opened a school in the priory on what is now Friars Street, three centuries before Henry VIII broke with Rome. Continuity through eight hundred years is more an interpretation than a fact: surviving evidence shows a succession of educational provisions rather than one unbroken institution. But the line as the academy traces it runs friars to burgh grammar to Enlightenment academy to modern comprehensive, and the new building at Culduthel where today's students sit cost £46 million when it opened in August 2016.
The Dominican priory school operated from 1223 to 1668—four and a half centuries during which Scottish education shifted from monastic instruction in Latin grammar to the burgh schools of the Reformation. The town grammar school took over in 1668, located on what is now Church Street where the Dunbar Centre stands. In 1792, during the rectorship of Hector Fraser, the merchants and lawyers of Inverness founded the Royal Academy as something more ambitious: an Enlightenment-inflected institution designed as 'a stepping stone to full university status for the burgh,' with a curriculum dominated not by Classics but by sciences and mathematics. The first minute book records the founders' explicit intent. Subscriptions came in from across the transatlantic colonies—former pupils settling in the Caribbean and elsewhere kept ties to the burgh that had educated them, and some of the early rolls list students described as 'coloured' studying alongside white peers from the Highlands.
For its first quarter-century, the Academy lived up to its scientific ambitions. The Rectors hired were biased toward the emerging disciplines—Alexander Nimmo, who became a disciple of Thomas Telford, ran the school until 1811 before leaving to work on civil engineering projects in the West of Ireland. Matthew Adam, a mathematician, succeeded him. Girls attended from the start, though the academy's offerings for them were more limited: English, writing, drawing, and an unusual enthusiasm for geography. One mid-19th century girl was adjudged the best mathematics pupil in the school but could not receive the appropriate medal, which went only to boys. Compulsory schooling after 1872 reshaped expectations. The professions demanded better facilities. In 1895 the academy moved to a new building on the Crown, the Midmills site that later housed UHI Inverness College.
Through the 1950s and 1960s, the school remained fee-paying and selective, with Gaelic-speaking pupils from the Western Isles housed in a hostel on Culduthel Road. The movement toward comprehensive education in Scotland eventually reached it: by the mid-1970s, the academy had become a six-year area comprehensive, again on a new site at Culduthel Road. The 1992 bicentenary brought Prince Andrew, accompanied by Lachlan Mackintosh of Mackintosh, to celebrate. Prince Edward visited in 2003 and again in 2009. The catchment area now feeds in pupils from ten associated primaries—Stratherrick, Aldourie, Cauldeen, Farr, Foyers, Hilton, Holm, Lochardil, Inshes, and Bun-sgoil Ghaidhlig Inbhir Nis (the Gaelic Primary School of Inverness)—plus children from St Joseph's and Bishop Eden Catholic primaries who transfer after Primary 7. About a hundred pupils each year live outside the catchment but request placement at the academy.
The alumni list reaches across two and a half centuries. James Macpherson, the burgh grammar school's most famous graduate, produced the 'translations' of Ossian that influenced European literature even after they were exposed as largely his own invention. Alistair MacLean, who wrote The Guns of Navarone and Where Eagles Dare, attended. So did Elizabeth MacKintosh, who wrote crime fiction under the name Josephine Tey, including The Daughter of Time. Forensic anthropologist Dame Sue Black, born in 1961 and now one of Britain's foremost figures in disaster victim identification, was educated here. The Reverend John A. Mackay served as Third President of Princeton Theological Seminary. Derry Irvine, Baron Irvine of Lairg, was Lord High Chancellor of England and Wales from 1997 to 2003. The list also includes James Matheson, co-founder of Jardine Matheson, who in the Academy's own description was 'completely frank that his prosperity came from the opium trade'—a candour about Empire that the modern academy has not edited away.
The £46 million building that opened on 18 August 2016 reflects what a modern comprehensive needs. Four floors arrange the curriculum vertically. The ground floor holds the guidance and year head bases, four technology workshops, PE classrooms, two large games halls, learning support, reception, and the canteen under a larger atrium with a café area under a smaller one. The first floor houses a theatre above the staircase with an attached drama studio, plus the fitness suite, dance studio, humanities classrooms, business studies, graphic communication, engineering science, music, and home economics. The second floor is English, Gaelic, Modern Languages and Mathematics. The third floor holds the sciences—physics, biology, chemistry—plus a second computer room and the art department. Construction began in summer 2014. The accident in 1962, when a 15-year-old boy fell to his death climbing on Stac Pollaidh with the school's outdoor club, remains the one tragedy the academy's history pages mark in detail.
Located at 57.449N, 4.225W in the Culduthel area on the southern edge of Inverness. Inverness Airport (EGPE) sits 7 nm to the east-north-east, making this one of the easiest landmarks to spot on approach. Recommended viewing altitude 1,500 to 3,000 ft AGL. The modern school complex on Culduthel Road is visible as a large clustered building set among the southern suburbs of the city. Inverness Castle and the River Ness lie a couple of miles north; the Beauly Firth opens westward; the Moray Firth runs east toward the open sea. The historic predecessor buildings—Friars Street near the river, Church Street, Academy Street, and the Midmills site near the Crown—lie within the older city centre and are accessible on foot.