Chapter XI: Part II: The Isles and the Folk (2)

If Birsay were to display before our eyes this morning a pageant of her past history, the procession would be a varied one. The hunting-parties of the Norse Earls, the coming of the first bishop to teach the new faith, the building of the first Norse church, the burial of Earl Magnus, the procession of pilgrims seeking miraculous healing at his tomb, the removal of the sacred relics to the church of St. Olaf at Kirkwall to await the building of a more magnificent shrine, the ruinous favour of the Scottish Earls, the raising of a second Holyrood in the old Barony whose stately splendour was the measure of the robbery and extortion suffered by the people, the passing of this incongruous pomp and the return of welcome obscurity and quiet—truly a long and picturesque procession!

We resume our journey, however, and soon reach Twatt, where the road divides. The branch to the left leads to the important district of Dounby, on the borders of the three parishes of Birsay, Harray, and Sandwick, and then passes through the whole length of Harray to join the Kirkwall and Stromness road.

Harray is an interesting parish. It is the only parish in Orkney which does not touch the sea. Its soil is on the whole fertile, the surface being diversified by moraines brought down by glaciers from the steep hills to the east. The farms are generally small, but the farmers are mostly in the happy position of being owners as well as occupiers, and the number of “lairds” in this parish has long been proverbial in Orkney.

We decide, however, on taking the road to the right, as we wish to see something of the famous “west shore.” Three or four miles brings us to the head of the Harray Loch; but instead of descending to the mill of Rango we turn to the right at the cross-roads, and shortly reach the hamlet of Aith, beside the Loch of Skaill, our charming “Loch in Orcady.” Here we turn once more to the right, following a road which skirts the loch and leads us almost to the shores of the Bay of Skaill, a fine sweep of sandy beach, but exposed to the full fury of the Atlantic.

At its southern corner we examine a large “Pict’s House,” now opened up—the “Weem of Scarabrae.” Then we decide to climb the slope beyond and visit the “Hole o’ Roo,” a famous cave piercing a bold headland, which from the horizontal lie of the rock strata looks as if it had been built of gigantic flagstones by a race of Titans.

We are now entering on the finest stretch of cliff scenery in the islands, with the exception of Hoy, and from here to Stromness, a distance of some eight miles, the walk is one to remember and to repeat. But now for the first time we find our bicycles a hindrance instead of a help, and we are at a loss what to do with them. We may decide to turn back to the main road, ride to Stromness, and, leaving them there, explore the coast on foot, which is the most satisfactory plan. If we decide to take them on with us, we shall find that considerable stretches of the ground are level enough to permit of a rough ride on the turf, and for the last three miles of the distance there is a fair road.

The next point of interest after leaving Row Head is the Noust of Bigging, sheltered by its Brough, an excellent place from which to watch the Atlantic breakers when a heavy sea is running. A little way to the south is the Castle of Yesnaby, one of those isolated stacks of rock which have withstood the battering of the ocean while the cliffs around have crumbled and fallen. Its slender base, however, proclaims that its fate is only a matter of time.

In another mile and a half, after passing Lyre Geo and Inganess Geo, two impressive examples of how rocks decay, we reach the Castle of North Gaulton, a singularly slender and graceful pillar of rock. Then we cross a stretch of low ground, after which there is a steep climb up to the summit of the Black Craig. The height of the hill is 360 feet, and that of the cliff little less, while its sheer plunge down into the waves makes it look higher than it really is.

As we descend towards the south we pass over a district which is sacred in the eyes of geologists, for it was here that Hugh Miller discovered the fossil remains of the _Asterolepis_ or “star-scale” fish, a monster of the ancient days when the rocks of this hill were being laid down as mud and sand on the bottom of a primeval lake. The great geologist describes this district as “the land of fish,” and the rock strata fairly swarm with fossils.

The shore in front is now low and tame, but the whole district from hill to sea is fertile and well peopled. That it was so in the past also we see sufficient proof. For there, on the shore of Breckness, stand the ruins of a mansion built by Bishop Graeme, who knew well where to build; and a mile beyond it, in the lonely churchyard by the lonely sea, rises a fragment of an ancient church. There stood the church of Stromness in former days, and there also the manse; while the names of Innertown and Outertown doubtless refer to their relative nearness to this centre of parish life.

1. Dundas Street. 2. Church Road. 3. Victoria Street. 4. From the South End. 5. From the Harbour. 6. From the Hill.]

But times have changed, and it is no longer fertility of soil but convenience for trade which draws men together in close neighbourhood, and so the modern Stromness arose on the shore of that romantic little bay which spreads out beneath us as we cross the ridge to the left. That landlocked sea, and not the rocky hillside, was the source of its life and growth; and as we note the frequent steamships and the clustered fishing-fleet we realize that it is still the sea which brings prosperity to the little gray town.

Here, then, our circuit of the Mainland fitly ends, for in the opinion of many the town of Stromness, the “ness of the tide-stream,” is the fairest spot in all the islands. However this may be, it is indeed fair, and the Stromness boy will wander far and sail over many seas ere he will find a fairer scene than his island home;—fair when it lies before him under the pearl-gray light of its northern sky; fairer still, perchance, when the golden haze of memory gilds the landscape, and the joyous vision of the outward eye has given place to the wistful retrospect of the imagination.

SKETCHES BY HUGH MILLER.

The Dwarfie Stone.

We landed at Hoy, on a rocky stretch of shore composed of the gray flagstones of the district. They spread out here in front of the tall hills composed of the overlying sandstone, in a green, undulating platform, resembling a somewhat uneven esplanade spread out in front of a steep rampart. With the upper deposit a new style of scenery commences, unique in these islands. The hills, bold and abrupt, rise from fourteen to sixteen hundred feet over the sea-level; and the valleys by which they are traversed—no mere shallow inflections of the general surface, like most of the other valleys of Orkney—are of profound depth, precipitous, imposing, and solitary. The sudden change from the soft, low, and comparatively tame to the bold, stern, and high serves admirably to show how much the character of a landscape may depend upon the formation which composes it.

A walk of somewhat less than two miles brought me into the depths of a brown, shaggy valley, so profoundly solitary that it does not contain a single human habitation, nor, with one interesting exception, a single trace of the hand of man. As the traveller approaches by a path somewhat elevated, in order to avoid the peaty bogs of the bottom, along the slopes of the northern side of the dell, he sees, amid the heath below, what at first seems to be a rhomboidal piece of pavement of pale Old Red Sandstone, bearing atop a few stunted tufts of vegetation. There are no neighbouring objects of a known character by which to estimate its size. The precipitous hill-front behind is more than a thousand feet in height; the greatly taller Ward Hill of Hoy, which frowns over it on the opposite side, is at least five hundred feet higher; and dwarfed by these giants it seems a mere pavier’s flag, mayhap some five or six feet square by some eighteen inches to two feet in depth. It is only on approaching it within a few yards that we find it to be an enormous stone, nearly thirty feet in length by almost fifteen feet in breadth, and in some places, though it thins wedgelike towards one of the edges, more than six feet in thickness—forming altogether such a mass as the quarrier would detach from the solid rock to form the architrave of some vast gateway or the pediment of some colossal statue. A cave-like excavation, nearly three feet square, and rather more than seven feet in depth, opens on its gray and lichened side. The excavation is widened within, along the opposite walls, into two uncomfortably short beds, very much resembling those of the cabin of a small coasting vessel. One of the two beds is furnished with a protecting ledge and a pillow of stone hewn out of the solid mass; while the other, which is some five or six inches shorter than its neighbour, and presents altogether more the appearance of a place of penance than of repose, lacks both cushion and ledge. An aperture, which seems to have been originally of a circular form, and about two and a half feet in diameter, but which some unlucky herd-boy, apparently in the want of some better employment, has considerably mutilated and widened, opens at the inner extremity of the excavation to the roof, as the hatch of a vessel opens from the hold to the deck; for it is by far too wide in proportion to the size of the apartment to be regarded as a chimney. A gray, rudely-hewn block of sandstone, which, though greatly too ponderous to be moved by any man of ordinary strength, seems to have served the purpose of a door, lies prostrate beside the opening in front.

And such is the famous Dwarfie Stone of Hoy, as firmly fixed in our literature by the genius of Sir Walter Scott as in this wide valley by its ponderous weight and breadth of base, and regarding which—for it shares in the general obscurity of the other ancient remains of Orkney—the antiquary can do little more than repeat somewhat incredulously what tradition tells him—namely, that it was the work many ages ago of an ugly, malignant goblin, half earth, half air, the elfin Trolld—a personage, it is said, that even within the last century used occasionally to be seen flitting about in its neighbourhood.

I was fortunate in a fine, breezy day, clear and sunshiny, save where the shadows of a few dense, piled-up clouds swept dark athwart the landscape. In the secluded recesses of the valley all was hot, heavy, and still; though now and then a fitful snatch of a breeze, the mere fragment of some broken gust that seemed to have lost its way, tossed for a moment the white cannach of the bogs, or raised spirally into the air, for a few yards, the light beards of some seeding thistle, and straightway let them down again. Suddenly, however, about noon a shower broke thick and heavy against the dark sides and gray scalp of the Ward Hill and came sweeping down the valley. I did what Norna of the Fitful Head had, according to the novelist, done before me in similar circumstances—crept for shelter into the larger bed of the cell, which, though rather scant, taken fairly lengthwise, for a man of five feet eleven, I found, by stretching myself diagonally from corner to corner, no very uncomfortable lounging-place in a thunder-shower. Some provident herd-boy had spread it over, apparently months before, with a littering of heath and fern, which now formed a dry, springy couch; and as I lay wrapped up in my plaid, listening to the raindrops as they pattered thick and heavy atop or slanted through the broken hatchway to the vacant bed on the opposite side of the excavation, I called up the wild narrative of Norna and felt all its poetry.

The Dwarfie Stone has been a good deal undervalued by some writers, such as the historian of Orkney, Mr. Barry; and, considered simply as a work of art or labour, it certainly does not stand high. When tracing, as I lay abed, the marks of the tool, which in the harder portions of the stone are still distinctly visible, I just thought how that, armed with pick and chisel, and working as I was once accustomed to work, I could complete such another excavation to order in some three weeks or a month. But then I could not make my excavation a thousand years old, nor envelop its origin in the sun-gilt vapours of a poetic obscurity, nor connect it with the supernatural through the influence of wild, ancient traditions, nor yet encircle it with a classic halo borrowed from the undying inventions of an exquisite literary genius.

The pillow I found littered over with the names of visitors; but the stone—an exceedingly compact red sandstone—had resisted the imperfect tools at the command of the traveller, usually a nail or a knife, and so there were but two of the names decipherable—that of an “H. Ross, 1735,” and that of a “P. Folster, 1830.” The rain still pattered heavily overhead, and with my geological chisel and hammer I did, to beguile the time, what I very rarely do—added my name to the others, in characters which, if both they and the Dwarfie Stone get but fair play, will be distinctly legible two centuries hence. In what state will the world then exist, or what sort of ideas will fill the head of the man who, when the rock has well-nigh yielded up its charge, will decipher the name for the last time, and inquire, mayhap, regarding the individual whom it now designates, as I did this morning when I asked, “Who was this H. Ross, and who this P. Folster?”? I remember when it would have saddened me to think that there would in all probability be as little response in the one case as in the other; but as men rise in years they become more indifferent than in early youth to “that life which wits inherit after death,” and are content to labour on and be obscure.

The sun broke out in great beauty after the shower, glistening on a thousand minute runnels that came streaming down the precipices, and revealing through the thin, vapoury haze the horizontal lines of strata that bar the hillsides, like courses of ashlar in a building. I failed, however, to detect, amid the general many-pointed glitter by which the blue, gauze-like mist was bespangled, the light of the great carbuncle for which the Ward Hill has long been famous—that wondrous gem, according to Sir Walter, “that, though it gleams ruddy as a furnace to them that view it from beneath, ever becomes invisible to him whose daring foot scales the precipices whence it darts its splendour.”

The Standing Stones.

The Standing Stones—second in Britain, of their kind, only to those of Stonehenge—occur in two groups; the smaller group (composed, however, of the taller stones) on the southern promontory, the larger on the northern one. Rude and shapeless, and bearing no other impress of the designing faculty than that they are stuck endwise in the earth, and form, as a whole, regular figures on the sward, there is yet a sublime solemnity about them, unsurpassed in effect by any ruin I have yet seen, however grand in its design or imposing in its proportions. Their very rudeness, associated with their ponderous bulk and weight, adds to their impressiveness. When there is art and taste enough in a country to hew an ornate column, no one marvels that there should be also mechanical skill enough in it to set it up on end; but the men who tore from the quarry these vast slabs, some of them eighteen feet in height over the soil, and raised them where they now stand, must have been ignorant savages unacquainted with machinery, and unfurnished, apparently, with a single tool.

The consideration, too, that these remains—eldest of the works of man in this country—should have so long survived all definite tradition of the purposes which they were raised to serve, so that we now merely know regarding them that they were religious in their uses—products of that ineradicable instinct of man’s nature which leads him in so many various ways to attempt conciliating the Powers of another world—serves greatly to heighten their effect.

The appearance of the obelisks, too, harmonizes well with their great antiquity and the obscurity of their origin. For about a man’s height from the ground they are covered thick by the shorter lichens—chiefly the gray-stone _parmelia_—here and there embroidered by the golden-hued patches of the yellow _parmelia_ of the wall; but their heads and shoulders, raised beyond the reach alike of the herd-boy and of his herd, are covered by an extraordinary profusion of a flowing beard-like lichen of unusual length—the lichen _calicarus_ (or, according to modern botanists, _Ramalina scopulorum_), in which they look like an assemblage of ancient Druids, mysteriously stern and invincibly silent and shaggy as the Bard of Gray, when

“Loose his beard and hoary hair
Streamed like a meteor on the troubled air.”

The day was perhaps too sunny and clear for seeing the Standing Stones to the best possible advantage. They could not be better placed than on their flat promontories, surrounded by the broad plain of an extensive lake, in a waste, lonely, treeless country, that presents no bold competing features to divert attention from them as the great central objects of the landscape; but the gray of the morning or an atmosphere of fog and vapour would have associated better with the misty obscurity of their history, their shaggy forms, and their livid tints than the glare of a cloudless sun, that brought out in hard, clear relief their rude outlines, and gave to each its sharp, dark patch of shadow. Gray-coloured objects, when tall and imposing, but of irregular form, are seen always to most advantage in an uncertain light—in fog or frost-rime, or under a scowling sky, or, as Parnell well expresses it, “amid the livid gleams of night.” They appeal, if I may so express myself, to the sentiment of the ghostly and the spectral, and demand at least a partial envelopment of the obscure. Burns, with the true tact of the genuine poet, develops the sentiment almost instinctively in an exquisite stanza in one of his less-known songs. “The Posie,”—

“The hawthorn I will pu’, wi’ its locks o’ siller gray,
Where, like an aged man, it stands at break o’ day.”

Scott, too, in describing these very stones, chooses the early morning as the time in which to exhibit them, when they “stood in the gray light of the dawning, like the phantom forms of antediluvian giants, who, shrouded in the habiliments of the dead, come to revisit, by the pale light, the earth which they had plagued with their oppression, and polluted by their sins, till they brought down upon it the vengeance of the long-suffering heaven.” On another occasion he introduces them as “glimmering, a grayish white, in the rising sun, and projecting far to the westward their long, gigantic shadows.” And Malcolm, in the exercise of a similar faculty with that of Burns and of Scott, surrounds them, in his description, with a somewhat similar atmosphere of partial dimness and obscurity:—

“The hoary rocks, of giant size,
That o’er the land in circles rise,
Of which tradition may not tell.
Fit circles for the wizard’s spell,
Seen far amidst the scowling storm,
Seem each a tall and phantom form,
As hurrying vapours o’er them flee,
Frowning in grim obscurity,
While, like a dread voice from the past,
Around them moans the autumnal blast.”

There exist curious analogies between the earlier stages of society and the more immature periods of life—between the savage and the child; and the huge circle of Stennis seems suggestive of one of these. It is considerably more than four hundred feet in diameter; and the stones which compose it, varying from three to fourteen feet in height, must have been originally from thirty-five to forty in number, though only sixteen now remain erect. A mound and fosse, still distinctly traceable, run round the whole; and there are several mysterious-looking tumuli outside, bulky enough to remind one of the lesser moraines of the geologist. But the circle, notwithstanding its imposing magnitude, is but a huge child’s house after all—one of those circles of stones which children lay down on their village green, and then, in the exercise of that imaginative faculty which distinguishes between the young of the human animal and those of every other creature, convert, by a sort of conventionalism, into a church or dwelling-house, within which they seat themselves and enact their imitations of the employments of their seniors, whether domestic or ecclesiastical. The circle of Stennis was a circle, say the antiquaries, dedicated to the sun. The group of stones on the southern promontory of the lake formed but a half-circle, and it was a half-circle dedicated to the moon. To the circular sun the great rude children of an immature age of the world had laid down a circle of stones on the one promontory; to the moon, in her half-orbed state, they had laid down a half-circle on the other; and in propitiating these material deities they employed in their respective enclosures, in the exercise of a wild, unregulated fancy, uncouth, irrational rites.

HUGH MILLER (_“Rambles of a Geologist.”_)

THE CATHEDRAL OF ST. MAGNUS.

You would hardly expect to find an ancient cathedral up in those Orkney Islands that one usually sees huddled away in a spare corner of the map, and made to look even smaller than they are by the exigencies of space. It is curious to think of: once, long ago, strange ships with monstrous figure-heads and painted sides, full of the northern actors of history, crawled with their lines of oars into the sounds and bays of these islands, till for centuries they became the stage for dramatic events and stirring personages. Some of the players bore names that any history book tells of. Harald Hardrada, old King Haco, Bothwell, and Montrose have all played their parts. And there are others, earls and prelates, and northern kings, and old sea-rovers, who were really far better worth knowing than half the puppets with more familiar labels. Then, gradually the lights went out and the audience turned away to look at other things, and the Orkneymen were left to observe the Sabbath and elect a County Council. One by one the old buildings toppled down, and the old names changed, and the old customs faded, till the place of the islands in history became their place upon the map; but time and men have spared one thing—this old cathedral church of St. Magnus in Kirkwall.

1. Earl’s Palace. 2. Bridge Street. 3. Albert Street. 4. Bishop’s Palace.]

On the ancient houses of the little borough and the winding slit of a street, the old red church still looks down benignly, and sometimes (of a Sunday, I think, especially) a little humorously. Over the gray roofs and the tree-tops in sheltered gardens, and the black mites of people passing on their business, its lustreless Gothic eyes see a wide expanse of land and a wider and brighter sweep of sea. The winding sounds and broadening bays join and divide and join again, through and through its island dominions. Backwards and forwards, twice a day, the flood tide pours from the open Atlantic, and each channel becomes an eastward flowing river; and then from the North Sea the ebb sets the races running to the west. Everywhere is the sight or the sound of the sea—rollers on the western cliffs, salt currents among the islands, quiet bays lapping the feet of heathery hills. Out of the two great oceans the wind blows like the blasts of an enormous bellows, and on the horizon the clouds are eternally gathering.

It is over this land of moor and water and vapour that the cathedral watches the people; and though from the difficulty of passing through so narrow a street it has never moved from the spot where it first arose, and has never seen, one would suppose, the greater part of its territories, yet it knows—none better—the stories and the spirit of all the islands. Crows and gulls cruise round the tower familiarly, and perhaps bring gossip; but eyes so long and narrow, and of so inhuman an anatomy, may very likely see through a hill or a heart for themselves.

The country is like a fleet at sea, and the old spirit of the people came from the deep. At first that spirit was only restless and fierce and free; in time it began to think, and at odd moments to be troubled, and they called it pious. Then it looked for a fitting house where it might live when it could no longer find a home in the people. So it built the red cathedral, and there it silently dwells to-day.

There is something in their church that none of the respectable townsfolk have the slightest suspicion of—something alive that vibrates to the cry of the wind and the breaking of the sea, and the little human events that happen in the crow-stepped houses.

On the wild autumn afternoons when the hard north-east wind is driving rain and sleet through the town, the old church begins to remember. The wind and the sleet coming over the sea stir the quick spirit so sharply that every angle is full of sighing noises. As the shortened day draws to an end, and lights begin to twinkle in the town, and the showers become less frequent, and the clouds are rolled up and gathered off the sky, then the people come out into the streets and see the early stars above the gable-ends and high cathedral tower. They think it cold, and walk quickly, but a personage of sandstone takes little note of the temperature. The cathedral merely feels refreshed.

When the clear, windy night draws in, the people go to rest, and one by one the lights are put out till only the stars and the lighthouses are left. Looking over a darkened town and an empty night, with the air moving fresh from Norway, the memories come thick upon the old church which shelters so many bones. It is like digging up the soil of those lands from which the sea has for centuries receded, and where the ribs of ships and the skeletons of sailors lie deep beneath the furrows of the plough.

Kirkwall must have been a strange little town before the cathedral’s memory begins, when there was no red tower above the narrow street and the little houses, in the days when Rognvald, the son of Kol, had vowed to dedicate a splendid minster to his uncle, St. Magnus, should he come by his own and call himself Earl of Orkney; and when the islanders waited to see what aid the blessed saint would furnish to this enterprise.

It is one of the island tragedies—the saga of how the evil Earl Hakon slew his cousin, Earl Magnus, outside the old church of Egilsay with that high round tower that you can see over Kirkwall Bay from the cathedral parapet, and how the grass grew greener where he fell, and miracles multiplied, and they made him a saint in time.

Though all these events happened before a stone of the cathedral was laid, they may help to give the meaning of its story, and on that account they are worth, perhaps, a rough telling here. Earl Hakon had died, and his son Paul ruled in his stead. He was a silent, brave, unlucky man, upright and honourable in his dealings, but the shadow of his father’s crime lay over the land. It brought old age and prosperity and repentance to the doer of the deed; and on his son the punishment fell.

1. South aisle. 2. North aisle. 3. Nave.]

Rognvald claimed the half of the earldom. Paul answered that there was no need for long words, “For I will guard the Orkneys while God grants me life so to do.” And then the contest began. Rognvald attacked from north and south. Paul vanquished the southern fleet, and hurrying north drove his rival back to Norway; and so the winter came on, and the peace that in those days men kept in winter.

All had gone well with Paul, but his luck was to change with a little thing. He was keeping Yule with his friends and kinsmen, when upon a winter’s evening, a man, wet with the spray of the Pentland Firth, came out of the dusk and knocked upon the door. He was hardly the instrument, one would think, a departed saint would choose to build a cathedral with—a Viking with his sword ever loose in its sheath, and his lucky star obscured, coming here for refuge, from the ashes of his father and his home. He was known as Sweyn Asleifson (a name to be famous in the islands), and was welcomed for his family’s sake; they brought him in to the feast, and the drinking went on. In a little while there arose a quarrel over the cups; Sweyn killed his man, and fled into the night again. He was a landless outlaw this time, for the dead man had been high in favour, and the earl was stern. Meanwhile men went on drinking over the hall fires; but Paul’s luck had departed, and St. Magnus had a weapon in his hand. In the spring the war began again, and suddenly in the midst of it Earl Paul disappeared—his bodyguard cut down upon the beach, himself spirited clean away. Sweyn Asleifson had come for him, and carried him to a fate that was never more than rumoured. So Rognvald won the earldom, and the first stones of his church were laid. The saint had certainly struck for him.

That is the true story of the vow and the building of the cathedral, a tale too old for even the venerable church to remember. But all the long history of the seven centuries since it knows; and indeed it has played such a part in scene after scene and act after act, that a memory would have to be of some poorer stuff than hewed sandstone to forget a past so stirring. And who can be so far behind every scene as the house which during men’s lives listens to their prayers, and at last upon a day takes them in for ever?

When it first began to look down from its windows upon those men going about their business in the sunshine or the rain, it saw among the little creatures some that were well worth remembering, though there be few but the cathedral to remember them now. There was Rognvald himself, that cheerful, gallant earl who made poetry and war, and sailed to Jerusalem with all his chiefs and friends, fighting and rhyming all the way, and riding home across the length of Europe, and who, when he fell by an assassin’s hand, was laid at last beneath the pavement of this cathedral he had founded. And then, most memorable of all the great odallers who followed him in war and sat at his Yule feasts, there was the Viking, Sweyn Asleifson, he who kidnapped Paul, and afterwards became the lifelong and, on the whole, faithful friend of Rognvald, and the faithless enemy of almost every one else; the most daring, unscrupulous, famous, and—judging by the way he always obtained forgiveness when he needed it—the most fascinating man in all the northern countries. He was the luckiest, too, till the day he fell in an ambush in the streets of Dublin, exclaiming with his last breath, in most remarkable contrast to the tenor of his life: “Know this, all men, that I am one of the Saint Earl Rognvald’s bodyguard, and I now mean to put my trust in being where he is, with God.” May he rest in peace wherever his bones lie, even though his reformation came something late, the turbulent, terrible old Viking, whom the Saga writers called the last of that profession.

The generation who built it had passed away, when on a summer’s day, after it had weathered nearly a century of storm and shine, the cathedral saw the greatest sight it had yet beheld. Haco of Norway had come with his fleet to conquer the Western Isles of Scotland, the Norse kings’ old inheritance. The pointed windows watched ship after ship sail by with coloured sails and shining shields, bearing the Norsemen to their last battle in southern lands; and then the islands waited for the news that in those days was brought by the men who had made the story.

Month upon month went by; men wondered and rumours flew; the days grew shorter, and the gales came out upon all the seas. At last, when winter was well upon the islands, what were left of the battered ships began to struggle home. They brought back stories that the cathedral remembers, though six centuries have rolled them out of the memories of the people—tales of lee-shores and westerly gales, of anchors dragging under the Cumbraes, and Scottish knights charging down upon the beach where the Norwegian spears were ranked on the edge of the tide; then of more gales and whirlpools in the Pentland, until at length they carried their old sick king ashore, to die in the bishop’s palace at Kirkwall.

1. West doorway, nave. 2. East window. 3. Doorway, south transept. 4. Doorway, north aisle. 5. Doorway, south aisle.]

He lay for two months in that ancient building—now a roofless shell, standing just beyond the churchyard wall—his most faithful friends beside him, the restless Orkney wind without, and the voice of the Saga reader by the bed. First they read to him in Latin, till he grew too sick to follow the foreign words; and then in Norse, through the Sagas of the saints, and after of the kings. They had come down to his own father, Sverrir, and then, in the words of the old historian, “Near midnight Sverrir’s Saga was read through, and just as midnight was past Almighty God called King Hakon from this world’s life.” They buried him in the great red church that had stood sentinel over the sick-chamber; and as the race of Vikings died with Sweyn, so the roving, conquering kings of Norway passed away with Haco, and never again came south to trouble the seaboards.

The Orkneys, however, were not yet out of the current of affairs. They cut, indeed, but a small figure compared with the Orkney of the great Earl Thorfinn in the century before Rognvald founded his cathedral—he who owned nine earldoms in Scotland and all the Southern Isles, besides a great realm in Ireland. But there was still a bishop in the palace and an earl with powers of life and death in his dominion, and an armed following that counted for something in war; and the cathedral was still the church of a small country rather than of a little county. The sun cast the shadows of dignitaries in the winding street, and the bones they were framed of were laid in time beneath the flags of St. Magnus’s church. When one comes to think of it, the old cathedral must hold a varied collection of these, for here lie the high and the low of two races, and no man knows how many chance sojourners and travellers.

At last, upon a dark day for the islands, their era of semi-independence and Vikingism and Norse romance came to a most undignified end. A needy king of the north pledged them to Scotland for his daughter’s dowry, as a common man might pledge his watch. East to Norway was no longer the way to the motherland, and the open horizon meeting the clouds, the old highroad, led now to a foreign shore. Henceforth they belonged to the long coast with its pale mountain peaks far away over the cliffs, which had once, so far as the eye could see, belonged to them. It was a transaction intended for a season, but the season has never ran to its limit yet. Now, it is to be hoped, it never will; but for centuries it would have been better for the Orkneys if they had gone the way of some volcanic islet and sunk quietly below the gray North Sea.

One might think that, when they had ceased to be a half-way house between their sovereign and his neighbours of Europe, and were become instead a geographical term applied to the least accessible portion of their new lord’s dominions, their history and their troubles would soon have ceased, and the islanders been left to fish and reap late crops and try to keep out the winter weather. But there was no such good luck for many a day to come. Alas for themselves, they were too valuable an asset in the Scotch king’s treasury. Orkney too valuable! That collection of windy, treeless islands, where great ponds of rain-water stand through the fields for months together, and a strawberry that ripens is shown to one’s friends! The plain truth is that, measured by a Scotch standard of value in those days, it would have been hard to find a pocket not worth the picking. The rental of Orkney was more than twice that of the kingdom of Fife, and Fife, I suppose, was an El Dorado compared with most provinces of its impecunious country. So north they came, Scotch earls and bishops and younger sons, to make what they could before the pledge was redeemed. And to the old cathedral was flung the shame of standing as the symbol of oppression. It was not its fault, and every stone must have silently cried to Heaven for forgiveness. But a cathedral meant a bishop, and an Orkney bishop meant the refinement of roguery and exaction. When these prelates in their turns came to inhabit permanently their minster, and they could at last hear the voice of its spirit that loves the land it watches, demanding an account of their stewardship, what could they say? The old excuse—“We must live”? I can hardly think the church perceived the necessity.

That monument which the old sailors and fighters of the north had built, that they might link a better world with the rough and warring earth, had to stand immovable for century upon century, watching the trouble of their sons. It saw them make their stand at Summerdale in the old fashion, with sword and halbert and a battle-cry on their lips, and march back again to the town in a glimpse of triumph. But that quickly faded, and the weight of new laws and evil rulers gradually broke the high spirit entirely. It saw the proud odallers reduced to long-suffering “peerie lairds,” and all their power and romance and circumstance of state pass over to the foreigner, until after a time it was hard to believe that, some pages further back, there was a closed chapter of history which read quite differently from this.

Down below the parapet of the tower the narrow streets were full of the most splendid-looking people, all in steel and the Stewart arms. Earls Robert and Patrick of that royal name, each, through his scandalous life, made the island the home of a prince’s court; and out among the moors and the islands the old race wondered whose turn it should be for persecution next, and how long Heaven would let these things be.

The downfall of the Stewarts’ rule came at last, violently as was fit, but to the end they used the old church on behalf of the wrong. The tower was wrapped in the smoke of the rebels’ musketry when old Earl Patrick lay by the heels in Edinburgh awaiting his doom as a traitor, and his son held Kirkwall against what might, by comparison, be termed the law, and it was only at the point of the pike that they turned the last Stewart out of the sepulchre of St. Magnus.

Then the long windows watched the shadows of all manner of persons, who are well forgotten now, darken the prospect for a while, and pass away to let other clouds gather; and in all that time there cannot have been many whom a critical edifice can recall with pride.

The bishops were sent about their business, and the Solemn League and Covenant was solemnly sworn. The troopers of Cromwell stalked through the old pillars with their wide hats the firmer set on. The Covenant was unsworn, and the bishops came back and acquired emoluments for a little while longer, till at last they went altogether, and in good, sober Presbyterian fashion the awakened people set about purifying their temple. Poor old church! they did it thoroughly. Away went carving and stained glass, and ancient tombs and bones, and everything that the austere taste of Heaven is supposed by man to dislike. They made it clean with a kind of yellowish whitewash, and divided it by a sanitary deal screen impervious to draught. In this shameful guise the cathedral has watched the advent of quiet days and the slow healing of time. To-day the greatest clamour it hears is made by the rooks. No earl’s men or bishop’s men quarrel in the streets; no one either fears or harries the islanders; the history of Orkney is written and closed and laid upon the shelf. The hands of the clock move evenly round, and the seasons change by the almanac.

But there stands the old red church, silently remembering and arranging in their due perspective all these things remarkable and true. The worst of it is that it makes no comment that a mortal can understand, so that no one can say what a seasoned, well-mortared observer of seven centuries of affairs thinks of changing dynasties and creeds, and whether it is disposed to take them more seriously than so many moultings of feathers, and if one can retain any optimism through a course of whitewash and draught-proof screens.

It is pleasant to think, for the old minster’s sake, that it heeds the rubs of fortune very little, and regards material changes just as so many shifts of plumage. Its people are still flesh and blood, and its islands rock and turf and heather, and it will take more than pails and paint-brushes, and pledges and covenants to make them otherwise. The winter days are as bleak as ever, and the summer evenings as long and light, and the sun rises out of the North Sea among the flat green islands, and sinks in the Atlantic behind the western heather hills; and it is likely enough that from the height of the cathedral tower many other most serious events look surprisingly unimportant.

J. STORER CLOUSTON.
(_“Macmillan’s Magazine.” By permission._)

A ROAD IN ORCADY.

In southern lands—and most lands are southern to us—the road runs between fragrant hedgerows or under shady trees; but in Orcady trees and hedges are practically unknown. Yet the road lacks not its charm, for this is a world of compensations. If we never breathe the fragrance of the may or hear the whisper of the wind-stirred branches, we have, on the other hand, nothing to shut out from our eyes the wide expanse of land and sea or to hide the blue sky over us, no fallen timber after a gale to block our way and make of our progress an involuntary obstacle race, and no thorns to puncture our cycle tyres. The lover of the highway may miss here much of the bird-life that enlivens the roads of the south; but our road has a life and traffic of its own quite apart from the trickling stream of men and horses which flows fitfully along its white channel. Flowers and flies, birds and beasts, the road has something for each and all of them. Even by day they use it, but from dusk to dawn they claim it as their very own.

1. Holm. 2. Harray. 3. Birsay. 4. Tankerness. 5. Orphir.]

I do not remember that Stevenson, who so loved the road, has written anywhere of its little life—of the birds and beasts, the shy living things, that haunt it. In the treeless isles of Orcady, at least, the furred and feathered creatures seem to think that man makes the road for their especial delectation. For all creatures of beach and bog, hill and meadow, it has its charms; and hence it is ever beat upon by soft, soundless feet and shadowed by swiftly moving wings, and many a little comedy or tragedy is played out upon its stage. We walk upon it in spring and summer through an air fragrant with the perfume of innumerable small, sweet flowers, with the music of birds and bees about us, and ever, under and behind all song, the voice of the great sea, full of indefinable mystery as of a half-remembered dream.

The engineer who makes the road unwittingly plans it in such fashion as to be of service to the folk of moor and marsh, of shore and furrow. In Orcady every road, sooner or later, leads to the sea. In former days the sea itself was the great highway, and therefore close to its shores are found the old kirks and kirkyards. For by sea men came to worship God, and by sea they were carried to their long home. The kirks and kirkyards being beside the sea, the road comes thither to them. It comes down also to the piers, the slips, and jetties, which play so important a part in the lives of the islanders. Thus the road passes within a few yards of the haunts of all the divers, swimmers, and waders that frequent our shores.

Also in making a road the aim of the man who plans it is to avoid, so far as possible, all ascents and descents. In carrying out this aim he raises the road on embankments where it passes through low and marshy grounds, and makes cuttings through the higher lands. Where it runs through such a cutting the roadside ditches catch and keep a little store of water in a dry season, and thither plover, snipe, redshanks, and dotterel bring their velvet-clad birdlings to drink. If the season be wet, the road raises above the marsh a comparatively dry platform, on which the birds may rest when not feeding, and the roadside dykes offer a shelter from wind and sun.

But our road draws feet and wings to it in many other ways. It passes now through cultivated fields, with dry stone dykes fencing it on either side; now it runs unfenced through the open moorland, and again along the very margin of the sea. Here it is bordered by marshes and there by a long reach of black peat-bog, and everywhere it woos with varied wiles the living things of earth and air. Before the dykes have seen many seasons they begin to deck themselves with velvet mosses, and to the miniature forests of moss come insects of the lesser sorts, flying and creeping things, red and brown and blue. In pursuit of these small deer come the spiders, which lurk in crevices of the walls and spread their cunning snares across the mouths of culverts where farm roads branch off from the highway. Long-legged water-skaters dart to and fro among the floating weeds on the surface of the stagnant ditches; and over these ditches the midges weave their fantastic dances on summer evenings. The litter of passing traffic brings hurrying, busy, burnished beetles, which find harbourage in the loosely piled banks of ditch scrapings that form the boundary between highway and moorland. Where the road, with its generous grassy margin, runs like a white ribbon with green borders through the brown moors, wild flowers that are choked or hidden in the heather spread themselves to the sunshine—primroses and daisies, clover red and white, milkwort and tormentil, hawkweed and violets, thyme and crowfoot: their very names read like a poem. The number of small wild flowers that grow in our roadside ditches and within reach of the road is amazing when one begins to reckon them. Here the steep grassy bank is gorgeous with rose-campion and with the purple and gold of the vetches, and all the air is sweet with the perfume of wild mustard, which with the pale yellow of its blossoms almost hides the green in that field of springing barley. This wet meadow, on either hand all aglow with the pink blossoms of the ragged robin, a little earlier in the year had its wide and shallow ditches glorified by the broad green leaves and exquisite feathery blooms of the bog-bean, while its drier grounds were starred with the pale cups of grass of Parnassus. In spring the vernal squills shone on yonder hillocks with a blue glory as of the sea in summer.

On this long flat stretch of peat-bog these are not untimely snowdrifts but nodding patches of cotton-grass. In autumn, when a strong wind blows from that quarter, all the road will be strewn with the silvery, silken down that makes so brave a show among the purple heather of the bog. Later still in the year the same bog will glow ruddy as with a perpetual sunset, when the long, coarse grass reddens. Passing this way on some gray afternoon the wayfarer will find it hard to believe that the “charmed sunset” has not suddenly shone out through the clouds “low adown in the red west.” And the peat-moss on which the road is built has other glories—green moss and moss as red as blood, fairy cups of silver lichen with scarlet rims, and long reaches of bog-asphodel, shining like cloth-of-gold and sweetening the winds with their faint, delicate perfume. Here, where our road runs on a firmer foundation, grow the wild willows, all low-growing and all adding a beauty to the year in their catkins. When the daisies have hardly ventured to thrust their heads into a cold world the catkins gleam in silky silver, changing as the days lengthen to yellow gold. Later on some of them are covered with an exquisite white down which floats their seeds about the land. The little burns which our road bridges ripple and chatter through miniature forests of ferns and meadow-sweet, the foxglove shakes its bells above the splendour of the gorse, and the yellow iris hides the young wild-duck that are making their way by ditch and brooklet to the sea. These are but a few of the flowers with which the road garlands and bedecks herself to welcome the little peoples who love her.

To the flowers come all day long in summer the humble-bees. These little reddish-yellow fellows, hot and angry-looking, have their byke or nest in some mossy bank or old turf dyke, to which they carry wax and honey for the fashioning of a round, irregular, dirty-looking comb. The chances are that they will be despoiled of their treasure by some errant herd-boy before July is half over. Their great cousins in black velvet striped with gold prefer to live solitary in some deserted mouse-hole; but they cannot, for all their swagger and fierce looks, save their honey from Boy the Devourer. Though there are no wasps in Orcady, the roadside blossoms have visitors other than the bees. Here come the white and brown butterflies, and those dainty little blue creatures whose wings are painted and eyed like a peacock’s tail. And at night moths, white, yellow, and gray, flit like ghosts above the sleeping flowers, or dance mysteriously in the dusk on silent wings.