Bonnie Scotland and what we owe her

by William Elliot Griffis

Shetland’s starting-point of chronology was this year, 1588, when the Spanish admiral, commanding the Duke of Medina, Sidonia’s flagship, was wrecked on this iron shore. About two hundred of the would-be invaders of Britain were rescued and lived, with the hardy islanders of Fair Island, on shell fish and wild fowl, until the monotony and sparseness of such unusual diet drove them to the “mainland.” There they were kindly received and were subsequently sent to Scotland. This name “Fair” comes from the Norse “faar,” a sheep, which is also the meaning in the name of Faroe Islands, which belong to Denmark.

At Oban we wondered at the fine knitted goods made in the Shetlands, each parish having its own specialty. This is true particularly of Fair Island on which the Spaniards were shipwrecked. Traces of the visit of these Southerners, both economic, moral, and physical, as we have noted, are still discernible. So delicate is the workmanship and so amazingly fine the fabric that stockings have been knitted which could be drawn through a finger ring. The women do most of the farm-work, laying aside the hoe and spade to spend their spare time with the needles in knitting caps, gloves, stockings, and waistcoats of the most varied patterns and in many combinations of color. In one of Murillo’s pictures, in the Dulwich Galleries, near London, is that famous one of the Flower Girl. She wears a shawl, which shows the pretty patterns reproduced in the knitted work of the Fair Island fair. “Parallel lines, diamonds, crosses, mathematical figures of every bright color are here, intermixed thread by thread, in the brightest contrast and beauty, each row being about one inch in size.”

Fishing is the chief occupation in the Shetlands and the mainstay of existence of the men, who with their families are very primitive and orthodox—for “orthodoxy,” of the traditional sort, besides being very easy, is a great saving of brain labor. Of old, the Dutch used to control the fisheries, and during their handling of them, it is said they derived a total sum of more than a billion dollars in profits from the business. One must read “The Pirate,” by Scott, to get the atmosphere of this little island world.

In the Town Hall at Lerwick, which is the capital of the Shetland Islands, are modern stained-glass windows which illustrate the history of the Shetlands. Visitors go by steamer to the Shetlands, chiefly to behold the wonderful cliff scenery, and men of science to study the work of glaciers. So well used have these wonderful graving-tools of the Almighty been, in ages past, that it is said that no place in the Shetland Isles is more distant than three miles from the sea. Scott’s last novel, which he named “Castle Dangerous,” refers not to this insular group, but what a good name for these remote regions of Britain, so feared by sailors, the title of his romance would make!

Yet in addition to Nature’s handiwork, done by glaciers, and to the weird scenery of the rocks, chiselled by ice and lashed by the ever-corroding sea waves, there are works of early man peculiar to the whole north of Scotland beyond the Great Glen or Caledonian Canal, which awaken curiosity, challenge attention, and hold the interest of the thoughtful.

These are the round towers, called “burghs,” “brochs,” or “Picts’ castles.” We noticed these in Sutherland and Caithness. They are cylinders of masonry tapering upward into a truncated cone, or are waisted, like a dice-box. The walls, composed of an outer and an inner concentric shell of untrimmed stone, have been evenly set, but without mortar. The rude masonry is bound together by four or five courses of slabs of slate, placed crosswise, so as to leave, in the thickness of the walls, a gallery of inclined plane winding up to the top, like a cork-screw. They are lighted by small openings or slits in the inside. The rest of the wall is filled in with loose stones, and it may measure in thickness from ten to fifteen feet. The towers vary in height, from twenty-five to forty feet, and in diameter, from thirty to fifty. The little doors, on the ground level, are low and narrow; sometimes not over three feet high. There are over four hundred examples of these towers in the north and northwest of Scotland, and in the isles, but are all more or less ruined. In the Shetlands are seventy-five; in the Orkneys, seventy; in Caithness, seventy-nine; in Sutherland, sixty; on Long Island, thirty-eight; in Skye, thirty, etc.

Not less remarkable are these stony memorials of the past than are the peculiarities of the religion, social life, dress, and literary aspects of the Highlanders and North Scottish people—composed as they are of Norse and Celtic strains. These have blended to produce a race of people that differs perceptibly from the southern Scotch Lowlanders.

Moreover, in the north and west there was not, as in the south, such a long-continued struggle of many and varied elements, local, continental, religious, artistic, moral, and economic, nor, until a century or two ago, such a blending of many ethnic stocks, but only of two or three.

This comparative isolation on the one hand, and exposure to, and penetration by, the manifold forces of culture on the other, have left their differing results visible in both history, human characteristics, and deposits of thought. Civilization is of the south and the Lowlands; but Scottish music and poetry, in their nascent, original, most forceful forms, are of the north and west. This is true, also, because among the most potent causes of difference are the aspects of nature, so strikingly in contrast as one nears England or Norway.

Scottish song and verse were born among the mountains nearer the North Star, and the first bards were hunters and cragsmen. In the early poetry and music of no land, more than in that of Scotland, are primitive art and pre-ancient nature more in accord. “Amid all the changes of human feeling and action, we seem to hear the solemn surge of the Atlantic breakers, or the moan of the wind across the desolate moors, or the sigh of the pine woods, or the dash of the waterfalls and the roar of the floods as the rain-clouds burst among the glens.”