Ross and Cromarty unites two historic counties of the northern Highlands, the large mainland shire of Ross, stretching from the North Sea to the Atlantic between Sutherland and Inverness-shire, and the small, remarkably fragmented county of Cromarty, created only at the close of the seventeenth century at the particular request of George Mackenzie, Earl of Cromarty, whose scattered estates it exactly followed rather than any coherent territory. An eighteenth-century survey found Ross wild, rugged and mountainous in its interior, its peaks rivalling those of Argyllshire and Inverness-shire, with Ben Wyvis among the most remarkable summits and, behind it, a hollow called Corriemulzie so deeply shadowed that the sun was said never to reach it between November and March.
The Cromarty Firth, narrow at its mouth but broadening into one of the finest natural harbours on the coast, was guarded by two dramatic headlands known as the Sutors of Cromarty, whose bold, abrupt cliffs facing one another across the water struck every traveller as one of the noblest scenes on the whole of that coastline. Cromarty town itself, with some 1,500 inhabitants, combined an extensive hemp-cloth manufacture with fishing and modest overseas trade, while Ross's western coast, broken by long sea lochs including Loch Maree and Loch Broom, remained given over chiefly to a pastoral economy of sheep, goats and small cattle, its shepherds still living through the summer months in remote hillside shealings.
Where the plough could not reach among the rocky western crofts, farmers still relied on the cas-chrom, or crooked spade, to work small fertile plots by hand, a tool and a way of life largely unchanged for centuries even as Lowland sheep-farming methods and Lowland settlers were, by the 1790s, beginning to reshape the county's agriculture. This combination of a fragmented lowland county built around one family's estate and a vast, wild Highland shire beyond it gives Ross and Cromarty an unusually layered administrative history even by Scottish standards.