On the day after arrival, I set out with Captain Henry T. Ellis, R.N. (of “Hong-Kong to Manilla”), to do the tour de rigueur—Scalloway[323] Castle and Moseyaburgum, the Mousa (Mósey) Broch[324] or Pecht House. We took the excellent northern road, begun during the famine, and finished some four years ago (1870): formerly when a picnic was intended, gillies were sent on to smooth the way for riders. After a few yards, we left the fertile seaboard, whose skirts and smooths are, as in Iceland, the only sites for agriculture, and entered the normal type of country, which begins in Scotland and Ireland. There can be no better description of bog and moor, of hill-land or commonty, and of “moss, mount, and wilderness, quhairin are divers great waters,” than that which opens the first chapter of “Lord Kilgobbin,” the last work of that most amiable and sympathetic writer, whose unworthy successor I now am: “Some one has said that almost all that Ireland possesses of picturesque beauty is to be found on or in the immediate neighbourhood of the seaboard; and if we except some brief patches of river scenery on the ‘Nore’ and the ‘Blackwater,’ and a part of Lough Erne, the assertion is not devoid of truth. The dreary expanse called the Bog of Allen, which occupies a high table-land in the centre of the island, stretches away for miles, flat, sad-coloured, and monotonous, fissured in every direction by channels of dark-tinted water, in which the very fish take the same sad colour.” Similarly we read of Scotland: “The inland, the upland, the moor, the mountain, were really not occupied at all for agricultural purposes, or served only to keep the poor and their cattle from starving.”
The surface of this Irish Sliabh and Icelandic Heiði, a true “black country,” natural not artificial, rolls in low warty moors revetted with moss, spangled with Fífa, or cotton-grass (Epilobium, or Eriophorum epistachion), and gashed with deep black earth-cracks, showing the substrata of peat; the tarns and flowing waters are inky as the many Brazilian “Unas” (Blackwaters), and though strongly peat-flavoured, they are not unwholesome. I could not find that they had been used for tanning, nor have the people yet found out the value of the “peat-coal,” macerated condensed[325] peat, so long appreciated by the Grand Trunk of Canada and the railways of New England and Bavaria; even in the Brazil a patent for the manufactory was taken out some years ago, and Bahia now exports the article. Yet in Lyell’s “Principles of Geology” (11th edit., vol. ii., p. 504) we meet the strange assertion, “No peat found in Brazil.” The supply of the bog factories near Montreal costs nine shillings to ten shillings per ton, or about one-fourth the value of pit coal. The Torbite of Horwich (Lancashire) is even cheaper, and experts have said that it gets up steam to 10 lbs. pressure in one hour ten minutes, and to 25 lbs. in one hour thirty-two minutes—the figures of Lancashire coal being two hours twenty-five minutes and three hours—at any rate, we may believe that when water is excluded, its heating power is about half way between wood and coal. Thus it becomes an article of general value to brewers, distillers, and manufacturers; and the Swedish iron, equal to Low Moor, as well as the yield of the Bavarian, the Wurtemberg, and the Bohemian mines, are all treated with condensed peat. It is now time to utilise the vast bogs of the finest deep black fuel, in which Ireland and the Hebrides, the Shetlands and the Orkneys abound, especially when perpetual colliery strikes, causing coal famines and the immense rise in the value of the combustible, have made steamers lie idle in our ports. Truly Torf-Einarr Jarl, who first taught the art and mystery of “yarpha”-burning, deserves a memorial statue on the Torf-nes.
In such “sea-girdled peat-mosses” as these, agriculture is a farce, and only sheep can pay. The foundation of the rocks, snowy quartz veining grey and chloritic slate, is that of Minas Geraes, and yet crushing for gold has not, we were assured, been attempted. Dr Cowie informed me that copper and iron are now successfully worked near Sandwich; and I hope soon to hear of prospecting for the nobler metal. At present our African California, the Gold Coast itself, is not more thoroughly neglected.[326]
Shetland life is concentrated near the sounds and voes (the Vogr of Iceland), where the dykes of Galway and Roscommon, dry or mortared walls, enclose yellow fields of oats, barley, and potatoes black with frost. Churches, and manses bigger than the churches; kilns burning kelp and lime; substantial houses, thatched with barley-straw, upon “pones,” or slabs of dried turf, the whole kept in place by “simmins” (straw ropes), stones, and logs, dotted the lowlands. Here and there stood a few willows and maple-planes, erroneously called sycamores,[327] under the shelter of walls; and uncommonly pleasant after Iceland was the twitter of the birdies. Many broken and unroofed cottages, some of them leper-houses in bygone days, reminded us that the disease lingered longer in Scotland than in England; in the Scoto-Scandinavian islands than in Scotland; and in Iceland than in the “Eyjar.” The frequent ruined home-steads of small tenantry, compelled, when their land was “laid down to grazing,” to seek their fortunes elsewhere, are the salient features. The “murid” (murret) coloured Shetland sheep have now made way for Scotch intruders; the cattle are from Ayrshire; and English horses, not “cussers from Lanarkshire,” have taken the place of shelties. Ducks and geese are everywhere; skarfs and gulls are more numerous than the speckled cocks and hens; and salt-fish, which here is not sun-dried, lies piled, as in Iceland, upon the sands.
Much has been said in books[328] about the physical beauty of the Shetlanders, but neither of us could see it. There is a greater variety of race than in the islands farther north, but less, as might be expected, than in the Orkneys and Caithness. The blue eyes are milder than in Iceland, the long bright locks are the same, but the complexion is by no means so “pearl and pink”—perhaps its muddiness may result from peat-water. The blondes, as a rule, wear that faded and colourless aspect, which especially distinguishes the Slav race. The look is shy and reserved, and the voice is almost a whisper, as if the speaker were continually nervous: strangers notice this peculiarity even in society. En revanche, the women appear to be peculiarly industrious. They crowd Commercial Street during the Monday markets, and even when carrying their heavy “cassies,” “cassie-cazzies,” or crates of peat, which serve for “Ronin the Bee,” they spin yarn and knit “tree-ply stockings,” apparently not intended for their own naked feet. The Wadmel, or Wadmaal, the North of England Woadmel, here better known as “Shetland claith,” cannot, however, compare with that of Iceland; the texture is loose, and the stuff in the shops is evidently meant to sell, not to last.
After seeing the humble wonders of Scalloway Castle, we struck southwards and across the Mainland, where we could hire a boat for the Whalesback of Mousa. The leek-shaped Broch has a pair of romantic legends attached to it, but they are too modern for interest. This most perfect specimen of the seventy round towers[329] has been often described, but no one seems to have noticed the similarity of the double walls of the vaulted and many-storied bee-hive chambers, and of the other peculiarities, with those of the pre-historic Sardinian Nurhágghi. The “stepped domes” of dry stone, and the “concealments,” also reminded me much of similar features in outlying Syria. Some ill-conditioned party of “cheap-trippers,” or “devil’s-dust tourists,” has lately fired the secular moss which clothed the south-western wall. On the way back to Lerwick there is another ruin in Clickamin (also written Chickhamin) Lake: interesting as the means of comparison, it has an addition evidently more modern of extensive outworks, which Mousa Castle wholly wants.
Unfortunately for myself, I had not time to call upon the late Mr Thomas Edmonston of Buness, whose philological labours are so valuable to northern students;[330] and to tell unpleasant truth, I was somewhat surprised by the success of the nineteenth century in abolishing all the old hospitality. We inspected the contents of the dark little room, the anthropological collection of the Shetlands, which deserves a catalogue, and other comforts of civilised life. Many Hjaltlanders have never heard of it. The most interesting articles are the steatite pots from Unst, and the ceramic remains, guiltless of wheel, collected in the Brochs. There are also some rough “thunderbolts”—here the stone celt is considered, as by the ancient Greeks, to be an ἀστροπελέυς. Hence Claudian (fifth century) sings:
“Pyrenæisque sub antris
Ignea flumineæ legere ceraunia nymphæ.”
We ran into Thorshafn (Færoes) on September 4, when a shower of rain had laid the fog. The “Isles of Sheep,” others say of “Feathers,” are evidently built like Iceland, with submarine trap; and the deep narrow “grips” between them, passages free from any danger except the “vortices,”[331] which can be seen, suggest that they have parted into long narrow fragments under the influence of subaërial cooling and contraction. The deep black strata appear peculiarly regular, as those of the western Fjörðs of Thule, streaked with lines of red ochre, spotted with white guano, and not showing, in this part at least, any signs of Palagonite or sea-sand. The leaf-shaped valleys, the water-falls, and the natural arches, are familiar to us after “Snowland;” the shallow turf lies upon the steepest inclines, and not unfrequently it is torn off by the frantic wind with as much ease as a rug is rolled up.
