[453]. William the Lion.
[454]. The “Fagrskinna” has (p. 148) “er fell i Vik”—he fell at Wick; but there is nothing to fix the locality of this battle more definitely. The tradition of the district points to Clairdon Hill, between Murkle and Thurso, as the scene of the encounter. The church which is here said to have been erected on the spot where Harald fell, and which is spoken of as standing there when the Saga was written, is not now in existence. The ruins of a chapel, which was traditionally believed to mark the spot, were removed when the ground was brought under cultivation by the late Sir John Sinclair. A remonstrance by the late Rev. Mr. Pope, of Reay, seems to have had the effect of causing the erection of an edifice (now used as the tomb of the Sinclair family) over the place where an old chapel stood. It is now known locally as “Harold’s Tower.” Large quantities of human bones, and several of the peculiarly-shaped Norse swords which Mr. Pope describes as “odd machines resembling ploughshares, all iron,” have been dug up in the neighbourhood.
[455]. The Bishop advised the people to allow him first to speak with the Earl, in the hope that he would be able to mollify him.
[456]. This seems to imply that it was at the grave of the holy Tröllhæna that the Bishop received his sight. Tröllhæna seems to be the Celtic St. Triduana or St. Tredwell, who, according to her legendary history, came from Achaia with St. Regulus in the fourth century. Being of extraordinary beauty, she was solicited by a Gallic prince, and to put an end to his solicitations she cut out both her eyes, and sent them to him skewered on a twig. Sir David Lindsay alludes to this:—
“Sanct Tredwall, als, there may be sene,
Quhilk on ane prick hes baith her ene.”
She died at Restalrig, near Edinburgh, and her tomb there continued, so late as Lindsay’s time, to be a resort of pilgrims who came to “mend their ene.” There is a chapel dedicated to St. Tredwell in the island of Papa Westray, which Munch considers likely to have been erected by Celtic ecclesiastics previous to the Norse invasion. There was another chapel dedicated to her at Kintradwell, in Sutherlandshire, where she is known as St. Trullen; but there is now no trace of a St. Tredwell’s chapel in Caithness.
[457]. The letter of Pope Innocent to the Bishop of Orkney, prescribing the penance to be performed by the man Lomberd, who cut out the Bishop’s tongue, gives the additional information that when the Earl’s men took the “borg” they killed almost all that were in it. (See the [Introduction].) The “borg,” or castle, at Scrabster, may have been an earlier building on the site of the “Bishop’s Castle,” an old fortalice on the cliff near the present hamlet of Scrabster, or it may have been the ruins of one of the still older Pictish towers, not far off, which the Caithnessmen may have occupied for the occasion as a defensible position.
[458]. Eysteinsdal is not now represented in the topography of the district.
[459]. The battle of Floruvogar took place in 1194, according to the Iceland Annals appended to the Flateyjarbók.