The Black Isle community faces competition from Orkney and the Borders in the Scottish episode, as viewers vote throughout the series for the architectural causes they feel most worthy of the cash injection.

A total of 21 buildings from around the UK will be eligible, with the Scottish edition of the show, presented by Griff Rhys Jones, due to air on Friday 18th August.

Each week three buildings from one part of the UK will be unveiled, with the winners of each of the seven regions going through to a final.

An eighth finalist will be the regional runner-up with the most overall votes.

In both 2003 and 2004 the series, supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF), awarded £5.5 million to the winning buildings, with 18 other buildings featured on the show receiving HLF funding.

Cromarty campaigners are hoping their objective will strike a chord with the rest of the Highlands and the television programme will not only fund the restoration of the Category A listed building, but will finally discover the exact date of the building's construction.

"We are extraordinarily lucky to have so much information about this building, including first-hand descriptions from the seventeenth century and afterwards, " said David Alston, the village's Highland councillor and historian who lives next door to the old Parish Church.

"It embodies so much that is typical of Scottish parish kirks. Restoration will preserve this for future generations and, perhaps, help us settle the debate as to the building's origins."

East Church at Cromarty.

The site of the church was the centre of religious life in the medieval burgh for eight centuries, but experts are divided as to whether the bulk of the building was built before or after the 16th Century Reformation.

Cromarty's most famous son Hugh Miller, stonemason, geologist, writer and church politician, was convinced it was post-reformation, but the recent discovery of a 14th/15th century grave slab and several pre-Reformation structural characteristics contained in the building has cast doubt over this traditional view.

Roly Keating, controller of BBC 2, said restoration uncovered a passion in the country to help restore valuable but very needy heritage projects and buildings, which could be lost forever if they did not get more support.

"After a year's break, the series has come back to address a very specific need - that of Great Britain's rural communities, whose heritage is relevant to everyone, but is in very grave danger of being lost amid a catalogue of problems facing the countryside and its people, " he added.

* You can vote for Cromarty's East Church by telephoning 09013 600500 AFTER the programme has aired next month. Calls cost £1.

calum.ross@inverness-courier.co.uk

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