The vicinity is full of antiquarian interest. From the hill above the town, as Dr. John Kerr says, one can see “memorials of every form of religion that has ever existed in Scotland.” A few miles off, towards the other side of the island, is a region strewn with prehistoric remains, like the moors of Karnac in Brittany. The most famous lion here is the Stones of Stennis, a circle of sacrifice, sepulture, or what not, second only to Stonehenge in our islands. On the opposite side of the deep double inlet of Stennis, half fresh and half salt water, stand or lie ruins of a similar circle, near which a modern Vandal has demolished the “Stone of Odin,” where Minna Troil would have pledged her faith to Cleveland by clasping hands through the opening of a pierced obelisk, gentler rite than that carving a captive foe’s back into “a red eagle,” for which one of these stones once made a scaffold. Not far off is the famous Maeshowe tumulus, whose mysterious runes have tried the ingenuity of many interpreters. Similar chambered mounds, “fairy howes” to the people, are found nearer Kirkwall, as in other islands, all over which may be encountered “grey, grim, and solitary standing stones, bearded with moss, which are kith and kin to the prehistoric obelisks of Stennis.” A sight of a very different kind is Balfour Castle, on the island of Shapinshay, where a mansion imitating Abbotsford has been decked out in exotic greenery, that seeks to vie with the gardens of Lewis Castle.
At the north end of the island, Birsay is visited for the ruined “palace” of the Jarls, and for the fishing of its lochs. The only other town is Stromness on the west side, a snug little port, for which the sea is “a domestic institution,” as Mr. Gorrie says. “It ripples familiarly up the short lanes between rows of houses, and the bows of vessels stretch across second-storey windows.” A ship’s cabin serves, or used to serve, as smoking-room in the garden of the hotel. The shop windows, besides sea stores, chiefly exhibit sweets and stockings, but such hints of innocent tastes may be overlaid in early summer, when thousands of herring-fishers come to make the place an unsavoury rendezvous, as it once was for whalers and Hudson Bay traders. Stromness should be noted in Scottish history for a law case in which this champion of open markets broke down the trade monopoly hitherto arrogated by royal burghs, like Kirkwall; and these competitors love each other as Margate loves Ramsgate. Its museum contains an interesting collection of fossils, among them that primæval monster the Asterolepis, of which Hugh Miller made his celebrated discovery hereabouts.
Off Stromness lies Hoy, an island containing the cream of Orkney scenery. On the north-west side the cliffs are higher than any of our mainland, and beside them rises the Old Man of Hoy, now on his last leg, but he once had two to prop up “the grandest natural obelisk in the British Isles.” The difficulty is to get a view of these giant rocks by leave of the rushing tideways and the squally winds. I have seen them only from their edge, yet might as well have been in Cheapside, when such a heavy drifting mist came on that I was glad to grope my way down, steering cautiously by half-obscured knolls, as shown on the Ordnance Map. The clearest sight I saw was the abashment of an English tourist, who suddenly emerged from the fog sans culotte, with fluttering shirt tails, wearing his most indispensable garment over his arm, perhaps from some mental confusion between Arcadian and Orcadian customs, or he had reckoned on meeting no one more modest than that Old Man of Hoy. Sights more safely visited are the Dwarfie Stone, the glen of Berriedale, the Kaim of Hoy, whose rock profile gratefully presents a silhouette of Sir Walter Scott, and the Enchanted Carbuncle seen by faithful eyes sparkling on the side of the Ward Hill. This is the highest point of the islands (1556 feet), from whose top, on a fine day, one has them spread out on the sea like a toy map, and can count their lower Ward Hills that once gave alarms of the approach of a foe.
Even the short crossing to Hoy may turn out a little adventurous; and the gentle tourist is not apt to make his way to less famous islands, their funnelled and tunnelled cliffs cut off from each other by such wild seas that this amphibious constituency has for its elections a fortnight’s grace beyond the rest of Britain. Next to Hoy, Rousay is the most Highland of the Orkneys, and North Ronaldshay is said to be the most primitive, as South Ronaldshay the most fertile. Each sundered portion cherishes a parish patriotism, once breeding hot feuds, but now chiefly represented by nicknames interchanged between the islanders, the Hawks of Hoy, the Crabs of Harray, the Sheep of Shapinshay, the Limpets of Stronsay, the Mares of Rousay, and so forth, neighbourly pleasantries that in the Shetlands take more offensively personal forms, as the Thieves of Yell, and the “Honest Folk” of Unst, so named with a note of interrogation. Some quaint Norse family names abound here, such as Halcro, Harcus, Inkster, Bea, Cursiter, Isbister; and, as one might expect, these are found so closely packed together that, on one island, a school-inspector mentions a roll of eighty children having among them only eight surnames. Scottish names are commoner in the Orkneys, my own for one, a branch of which “louped” so far north as Rapness in Westray, whence its thrivingest shoot came back to Perthshire, buying from his impoverished chief the family estate of that ilk with a fortune made apparently not in those wild seas, but as a public official. The Orkneys more than the Shetlands were overrun by Scottish lairds and their dependants who, like the English settlers in Ireland, fell much into the popular sentiment and grew to be more or less loyal sons of Thule.
As link between the Orkneys and the Shetlands, in the middle of Sumburgh Roost, where the Gulf Stream rushes almost as violently as through the Pentland Firth, stands the lonely little Fair Isle, a foul one for ships, which, like the Faröe Isles, gets its name not from beauty, but from the Norse faar, “sheep.” A botanist tells us how its one meadow is almost dyed in the season by the blue flower of the “sheep’s bit.” This cliff-walled island was once visited chiefly in the way of shipwreck, and still strangers are rare birds here, warmly welcomed, unless they turn out to be revenue officers or such like, the sight of whom used to set the people scurrying like rabbits to their burrows, while they opened their arms to preachers of any denomination. In Scott’s time they had a pastoral visit only once a year, sometimes not so often, where several couples might be ready for marriage in a lump, and a dozen children for baptism, one of them old enough to make an unedifying comment on the ceremony, as the novelist records. The great event in Fair Isle history was the shipwreck of the Spanish Armada’s Admiral, whose people quartered themselves here through the winter in a high-handed manner, that seems not to have hindered kinder relations with the fair islanders. A trace of their sojourn appears in the hosiery made by possible descendants of Spanish sailors, still showing the Moorish patterns brought to Andalusia, and thence to this bleak spot. These people do not always get such good words from their rare visitors as do the unsophisticated inhabitants of Foula, which, lying out to the west of the Shetlands, remote like St. Kilda from the Long Island, presents in its circuit of some nine miles what has been judged the noblest cliff scenery in Britain, in summer so clamorously alive with sea-fowl that “the air seemed as if filled with gigantic snow-flakes.”
One might here fill pages by quoting from enthusiastic ornithologists, and telling exploits of the daring cragsmen who have exterminated or thinned out some of the nobler fowl; but I have so much to say about man that I must leave beast and bird out of view. The Shetlanders are born fishermen, a craft that calls for no small courage in these latitudes. It is only at odd times they turn to their rugged and thin soil, whose most outstanding production seems the small Sheltie ponies, in great demand for use in southern collieries. Sir M. Grant Duff tells of one brought to the mainland, that it had to learn what oats were good for. As for the hungry sheep, a Midland squire I knew once transported a flock of them to England, where they forthwith fell to cropping their way through the hedges in which they found unwontedly toothsome pasture. Even domestic animals may show a touch of the sea, for seals are sometimes tamed as family pets. Otters are the Shetlands’ amphibious beasts of prey. The great game here is the “Ca’in’ whales,” now and then a sperm whale, that sometimes blunder into narrow voes, to be assailed with a general hue-and-cry of every soul that can get near them, as described in the Pirate, and in Mr. D. Gorrie’s Summers and Winters in the Orkneys.
Rounding the point of Torness, and stretching across the mouth of the bay, the fleet of small craft again hove into view, and pressed upon the rear of the slowly-advancing and imprisoned whales. Among the onlookers there was now intense excitement, the greatest anxiety being manifested lest the detached wing should follow the previous practice of the main army, and again break the line of the boats in a victorious charge. The shoutings and noise of the boatmen recommenced, and echoed from shore to shore of the beautiful and secluded bay. A fresh alarm seized the monsters, but instead of wheeling about, and rushing off to the open sea as before, they dashed rapidly forwards a few yards, pursued by the boats, and were soon floundering helplessly in the shallows. The scene that ensued was of the most exciting description. Fast and furious the boatmen struck and stabbed to right and left, while the people on the shore, forming an auxiliary force, dashed down to assist in the massacre, wielding all sorts of weapons, from roasting-spits to ware-forks. The poor wounded monsters lashed about with their tails, imperilling life and limb, and the ruddy hue of the water along the stretch of shore soon indicated the extent of the carnage. The whales that had received their death stroke emitted shrill cries, accompanied with a strange snorting and humming noise, which has been not inaptly compared to the distant sound of military drums pierced by the sharp piping of fifes. As the blood of the dead and dying more deeply incarnadined the sea, it gave a dreadful aspect of wholesale butchery to the murderous close of the summer whale-chase. Some of the larger whales displayed great tenacity of life, and survived repeated strokes and stabs, but the unequal conflict closed at last, and no fewer than a hundred and seventy carcases were dragged up the beach. One or two slight accidents occurred, but to me it seemed marvellous that the boatmen did not injure each other as much as the whales amid the confusion and excitement of the scene.
SHETLANDERS
The largest of the Shetlands also bears the name of Mainland, on the east side of which nestles Lerwick, the only town in these islands. Chiefly consisting of one long, narrow flagged street, with a modern esplanade upon a crescent bay, some of the houses actually standing in the water, for the convenience, it is said, of the smugglers who were frequent visitors, Lerwick is taken to resemble a Dutch seaport, a comparison carried out by the Dutch and other foreign fishermen familiar here. A new town has in our time sprung up on higher ground above. The place of Kirkwall’s Cathedral is taken by a very fine Town Hall, to the decoration of which the magistrates of Amsterdam and Hamburg contributed in recognition of old intercourse, as did several Scottish municipalities. Fort Charlotte, now station of the Naval Reserve, was originally built by Oliver Cromwell, who stretched his heavy hand so far north. The harbour is locked by the precipitous Bressay Island, outside of which lies the sundered Holm of Noss, once reached from its neighbour by a dizzy cradle, swung from cliff to cliff, which might well be revived as one of the “fearful joys” of the Earl’s Court Exhibition.