a flourishing school. Showing some aptitude for technical drawing, he was sent to Aberdeen for a year's tuition in drawing and architecture. It became clear that engineering would be his profession and, at the age of seventeen, he was employed as a trainee mason at the canal works then under way at Fort Augustus, on the south end of Loch Ness. As the son of John Mitchell, he was already on a fast career track, and from here he was taken to London by Telford, who liked the idea of a couple of 'raw Scotchmen' to act as his clerks and learn engineering at his house-cum-office. Joseph's years with Telford in London taught him a lot about dealing with officialdom, the rich and the nobility, as well as about engineering. In 1824, John Mitchell died, and Telford thought sufficiently well of Joseph to secure his appointment, aged only twenty-one, as his father's replacement. Over the next twenty years, Joseph Mitchell acquired an unparalleled knowledge of the Highlands and Islands, as an engineer planning, contracting, supervising and consulting on virtually every work of significance from new paving in the streets of Inverness, and the setting-up of the town's gasworks, to laying out roads and building piers in the Orkneys. By 1844 he was a prominent and highly respected member of the Inverness community, a director and co-founder of the Caledonian Bank, and involved in many aspects of life in the town and the countryside beyond. Mitchell was something of a glutton for work and rarely refused any offer of supplementary employment. James Hope, W.S., the Edinburgh-based Law Agent was to the Commissioners for Highland Roads, first got him to apply his professional talents to railway construction in 1837.Well beyond the Highlands, he surveyed an alternative route for the Edinburgh Glasgow Railway through the Earl of Hopetoun's grounds. <blockquote>From then on, Mitchell maintained an interest in railways, and noted in 1841 that the government had instructed Sir John McNeil to survey and lay out the main lines of railway in Ireland. He felt that the same thing could be done in Scotland through the already-existing agency of the Commissioners for Roads and Bridges. At Mitchell's urging, the provost and Town Council of Inverness made a proposal on these lines to the Treasury, and encouraged other town councils to do the same, but nothing came of it. Official guilt about the Highlands had