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It was one of the most ambitious projects of the First World War. In 1917, the American navy established a base at Inverness. They transformed what was then Glen Albyn distillery into a factory where mines could be assembled.

The mines were then ferried out to the North Sea to form the Northern Barrage, a bold plan undertaken jointly by the US and British navies. The idea was to lay a minefield from Orkney to the Norwegian coast and thus deny German U-boats access to the Atlantic.

In Inverness itself, relations between the newly-arrived Americans and the locals were good: there was a flag raising ceremony to mark the setting up of the base and the US Navy set off a brief Highland craze for baseball.

But as Inverness historian Richard Jenner explains there was one slight moment of friction after the war had ended and Scottish soldiers returned home: "The Scottish soldiers suddenly discovered all these Yanks in town who seemed to have very friendly relationships with their wives and girlfriends.

"At one point it got to a stage where there was a riot on the streets of Inverness. The Scottish soldiers kettled the US Navy sailors down the streets and forced them back into their barracks."

According to Richard Jenner, the sailors were confined to barracks for the duration of the minesweeping phase of the Northern Barrage. The big losers were the Inverness shopkeepers.

By the conclusion of war, the American and British navies had laid over seventy thousand mines along the 250 miles of the North Sea between Orkney and Norway.

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