The Highlands and Islands of Scotland

by A. R. Hope Moncrieff

CARTING PEAT, ORKNEY

When the last Norwegian invasion of Scotland had been defeated on the Clyde, Haco retired to Kirkwall, there dying in 1263. The winds warred against that armada, whose failure was not so much a decisive blow as one strain in a gradual loosening of Norse authority over the isles. Soon afterwards, Haco’s son formally resigned to Alexander III. all dominion of the Hebrides, except in the Orkneys and Shetlands, which were specially reserved to the Norwegian crown, by and by absorbed in that of Denmark. But two centuries later, when certain differences between these thrones came to be adjusted by the marriage of James III. to Margaret of Denmark, her father pledged the islands to Scotland for the bulk of her stipulated dowry, 60,000 florins, that have never been paid; and so we hold this part of our kingdom on a pawnbroker’s title, as to which international lawyers might cover acres of foolscap, if Denmark were disposed to clear off the mortgage.

Even earlier, Sinclairs and other lords from the mainland had pushed on to the Orkneys, which afterwards became so oppressively exploited by esurient Scots that theirs was no beloved name here; and the islanders, even now that old resentments are forgot, decline to look on themselves as Scotsmen. The mass of the population are of Norse stock, whose language died out here as slowly as Cornish at the other end of the kingdom; and still it colours the local dialect, that kept a quaint Quakerism of thee and thou, with a continental slurring of the h in such words. The islands are reckoned as a Scottish county, but their particularismus considers itself rather as a boat towed in the wake of Great Britain; and they speak of going to Scotland as Cornishmen of crossing the Tamar into England. Another correspondence with Cornwall is in the prevalence here of dissenting forms of Evangelical doctrine. Then, like the Cornish moors and cliffs, those of Thule are dotted with grey monuments of forgotten faith and bloodshed, long washed out of memory.

Except by isolated incidents, the islands enter little into the history of Scotland, since the days when it was alternately a refuge and a raiding ground for their Viking chiefs. Kirkcaldy of Grange was shipwrecked here in pursuit of Bothwell. Montrose pressed some of the islanders into his service, else they took slight interest in the wars of Whig and Tory. More than one stirring naval engagement came off at this northern end of the kingdom, long exposed to raids from French and Dutch cruisers, against which, indeed, most of the islands were well defended by their perilous reefs and currents. Their latest appearance in history was a hoax that deceived newspaper readers of 1866 into believing the account of a Fenian raid on Unst, with such details as a forced ransom, the taking of hostages, the minister hanged by his own bell-rope, all set forth so seriously that a man-of-war is said to have got as far as Aberdeen on its way to the rescue.

The two groups number some eight score islands and islets, not half of them inhabited. Lying in the Gulf Stream, they have a wet and windy climate, variable rather than severe, often cool in summer, raw and rheumatic in winter, when a truly dark December affords little chance for skating or curling. That many-weathered March of our islands usually brings the sharpest cold to this end of them. The whole archipelago is so broken into holms and indented by voes, that on the largest islands one will never be more than a few miles from the sea; nor is it easy to take a mile’s walk without coming on a reed-fringed, foam-edged basin of fresh water, over which salt spray blows into one’s face across the rough cliff-bound flats that swell up into waves of moor, but seldom into imposing hills. Except in a few favoured spots, where thin clumps of stunted wood are nursed like gardens, a telegraph post is the only kind of tree breaking the bleak horizon above heath and bog, with a lonely farm-house, a huddlement of cottages, a patch of fields now and then to remind us that this is no wilderness. Seen under its too frequent shade of sullen sky or drizzling showers, such a landscape strikes the lover of lush nature as dismal, yet it has its bright moments, sometimes its halcyon seasons in the long days of the far northern summers, and at all times taking features of its own. “The scene, which on a sunless day seems hard and cold, with occasional gleams of sunlight, becomes a perfect kaleidoscope of varying colours.” So writes Mr. J. R. Tudor in his excellent book on the islands, which also tells us of “vivid greens” in early summer, of glorious shows of red clover to relieve the prevalent dulness, and of a rich spangling of spring flowerets that here linger into June and July. The little purplish Primula Scotica has been called the queen of Orkney blooms, among them some rare in the North, and some that seem dying out in a hard struggle for existence. The writer who thinly disguised himself as “Shirley,” thus sums up our Thule’s finest features:—

For the artist there are vast spaces of sea and sky; the shining sands; the glories of the sunset; and above and beyond all the pageantry of the storm. For each day a fresh drama is transacted upon the heavens. The morning hours are often brilliantly bright; but ere mid-day the sun is suddenly obscured; the storm-cloud rises out of the Atlantic; sometimes the wind and rain lash the panes for hours; sometimes the cloud breaks upon the hills of Hoy, and passes away like a dream. The dénoûment of the drama is always obscure; you cannot predict what the end will be, and so the interest never flags. And among the land-locked bays and through the narrow channels there is excellent boating for those who can circumvent the tides. Unless, indeed, you know something of the obscure laws which govern the ebb and flow of the ocean in this network of islands, you are pretty sure to come to grief. For round many of them it runs like a mill-race. Between Hoy and Stennis, for instance, the ebb is simply a foaming and swirling torrent, against which sail and even steam are powerless. That vast body of water pouring into the Atlantic is as irresistible as a Canadian rapid. But if you study the tides, you can seek out secluded nooks, where the seals are basking on the tangle, and the wild duck are wheeling round the bay, and the blue rocks are darting out of the caves, and the grouse are crowing among the heather, and where for ten months out of the twelve the peace is absolute, and silence unbroken save by the shepherd’s dog.

AN ORCADIAN FIREPLACE

It has been remarked how the very superstitions of such a land run naturally to fishiness, as indeed all over the Hebrides uncouth leviathans haunt the fog banks, dragons lurk in the hollowed cliffs, sea-serpents in the voes as water-bulls in the lochans, and treacherously smiling mermaids, more to be shunned than all these monsters, delude men to their doom among slippery reefs. The mermaid legends may well have been suggested by half-human glimpses of seals. Our critical age is also disposed to relate them to occasional visits of Eskimo or Lapp adventurers, seen only to the waist in their skin canoes. Not so long ago there were people in the islands who boasted descent from “Finn” strangers, very possibly kinsmen of an aboriginal pigmy race, Picts, “Pechts,” or what not, that may here have left their memory in the “Trows” or “Trolls” of land mythology, and their name in the Pentland (Pechtland) Firth.