Chapter XIII: Part II: The Isles and the Folk (4)

The summit of the rocks, softly carpeted with grass, moss, and wild flowers, afforded a pleasant resting-place, and commanded a picturesque prospect. To eastward there was a wide expanse of sea, stretching away without a break to the Norwegian fiords. The whale-hunting fleet, composed of all varieties of small craft, was soon well abreast of our resting-place. A fine and favourable breeze had sprung up, and fishing-yawls, with their brown sails outspread, coasted briskly along. The rearguard of the fleet consisted of row-boats manned by patient and determined boatmen, who pulled hard at the oars in the prospect of winning some share of the spoil. We remained a short time on the moss-crowned cliffs gazing on the animated scene, and listening to the voices of the boatmen, the plash of the waves below, and the plaint of restless sea-birds. On leaving our lair we dropped down upon a neighbouring farmhouse, where a couple of “shelties” were placed at our disposal, and away we trotted along field-paths and rough tracks to the head of Rousholm Bay, on the south side of the island. From all the cottages and farms in the district the islanders were flocking to the shore of the bay, and we thus had good hope that a portion of the school at least had run blindfold into the whale-trap of Rousholm. On nearing the shore we were delighted to find that our hope was fulfilled. A large detachment of the whales, supposed to number one hundred and fifty, had entered the bay, while the rest of the school had disappeared amid the reaches of the Stronsay Firth.

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 main army, and again break the line of 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. The 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. Some of the larger whales displayed great tenacity of life; but the unequal conflict closed at last, and no fewer than a hundred and seventy carcasses were dragged up on 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. The carcasses, as I was informed, would realize between £300 and £400; and grateful were the people that Providence had remembered the island of Stronsay, by sending them a wonderful windfall of bottle-noses fresh from the confines of the Arctic Circle.

DANIEL GORRIE
(_“Summers and Winters in the Orkneys.”_)

ARTICLES MADE OF STRAW.

The Orkney peasantry of two centuries ago lived in a poor country—a country ground down by the tyranny of greedy and unscrupulous rulers; a country whose inhabitants had neither the raw materials from which to construct many necessary utensils nor the money to purchase them. It is interesting to note some of the ways in which our forefathers overcame the circumstances in which they were placed. One of the most notable is the ingenious use of straw for the construction of many domestic utensils.

The materials from which articles of straw were made were principally _bent_ and the straw of black oats. The bent, after being cut, was loosely bound into rough sheaves and left to dry and wither. It was then bound into neat sheaves called _beats_, the legal size of which used to be two spans in circumference. Each beat was carefully pleated at the upper end, gradually tapering upwards into a cord which served to bind two beats together. The pair of beats so fastened was called a “band of bent,” twelve of which formed a “thrave.” From this bent were made the cords, always called _bands_, which were used in the manufacture of straw. During the long winter evenings each ploughman was required to wind into bands one beat of bent. The cord was spun or twisted by the fingers, the two strands being each twisted singly, and at the same time laid into each other in such a way that the tendency of the strands to untwist was the means of keeping the two firmly twisted together.

The straw used was that of the common Orkney black oats, which was at once tougher and more flexible than that of other cultivated kinds. The straw to be used was not threshed with the flail, which would have spoiled it, but was selected from the sheaves, held in a bunch between the hands, and beaten on some hard edge to remove the grain. Such straw was called _gloy_. From those two materials, bent bands and gloy, a very wide variety of indispensable articles were manufactured by the Orkney farmer.

These articles may be divided into three classes—flexible, semi-flexible, and inflexible. Of the flexible type, the most simple and primitive article was the _sookan_, or, to give it a still older name, the _wislin_. This was simply straw twisted loosely into a thick cord of one strand, for temporary use. If not at once used to tie round something, it had to be wound into a clew to preserve its twist.

A very common use of sookans in the winter-time was to form what were known as “straw boots.” A loop of the sookan was passed round the instep, over the shoe or _rivlin_, the thick straw cord being then wound round the ankles and the lower part of the leg. When the snow was deep, such straw boots formed a very comfortable part of the peasant’s attire. Less than a century ago, on a Sunday when the snow lay deep on the ground, more than forty men wearing straw boots were seen in one Orkney church. It must be added that on the way home some of them were severely reproved by a neighbour for having performed this unnecessary labour on the Sabbath day!

Next in order comes _simmans_. This was a strong straw rope made of two strands, also twisted by hand, and rolled into great balls or clews, the size of which was the width of the barn door. The main use of simmans was to thatch the corn stacks, and also the roofs of the cottages. A newly-thatched cottage, with the bright warm colour of the new straw ropes, was a pleasing object in an Orkney landscape. The sombre colour given when the simmans were twisted of brown heather was less cheerful, but Nature did her best even here by her decoration of the low walls with bright yellow and green lichens.

Most of the ropes and cordage required by the Orkney farmer were made either of hair or of bent. The bent bands already noticed were made into ropes on a rude machine called a _tethergarth_, and were used for tethering cattle and sheep, and for “boat tethers” for small fishing-boats. Finer bent ropes were applied to a great many uses, such as flail “hoods,” sheep shackles, and all parts of horse harness. A very important part of this, the collar or _wazzie_, was formed by twisting four thick folds of straw together; and, when properly made, I suspect the wazzie was much cooler for the horse than the modern collar with its absurd cape. Even the plough-traces were made of bent ropes, which, if quickly worn, were easily replaced. For bringing in the crop, a large net made of bent cord, and called a _mazie_, was put round a bundle of sheaves, and suspended, one on each side of the horse, from the horns of the _clibber_, a rough kind of wooden pack-saddle.

_Flackies_, or mats made of straw bound together with bent cord, were used for many purposes. Small ones were used as door-mats, and large ones were hung up as an apology for an inner door. Horse flackies were laid over the back of the horse to protect it from the friction of the clibber, and his sides from the load which it supported. Flackies were also fixed on the rafters, under the straw, when thatching house roofs.

We next come to what I have called the semi-flexible class of straw articles. The first to be noticed is the _kaesie_, which, in various shapes and sizes, was put to a great number of uses. It was made of straw, bound by bent cord, like the flackie, but was of a closer texture, and it was usually in the shape of a basket. The _meils-kaesie_ was so called because it was made to hold a “meil” of corn—that is, a little over a hundredweight.

It was in these meils-kaesies that the corn was carried to the mill, and the meal brought back from it; for carts were unknown, and roads were but paths or tracks. Each horse carried a full kaesie on either side. The horses travelled in single file, the head of each being tied to the tail of the one in front. A man was in charge of each pair of horses, to attend to the proper balancing of their loads. A train of twenty or thirty horses marching in this way was a picturesque sight. On arriving at the mill, the burdens were removed, and the head of the foremost horse was tied to the tail of the hindmost, which prevented their moving away until their drivers were ready to return home.

Next may be mentioned the _corn-kaesie_, which was used to hold dressed grain. These were shaped somewhat like a barrel, and were made in various sizes. Then comes the common kaesie, used for carrying burdens on the back. These also were of different sizes. In form they were narrow and rounded at the bottom, and widened gradually towards the top, which was finished by a stiff circular rim called the _fesgar_, to give firmness to the basket. To the fesgar were fastened the ends of a bent rope of suitable length, called the _fettle_, by which the kaesie was suspended from the shoulders of the bearer.

To the same class as the kaesies belong the _cubbies_, the names and uses of which are legion. These were smaller than the former, and firmer in texture, while the shapes showed more variety, as might be needed for their special uses. We need only mention a few. The windo’ or winnowing cubbie was used to pour out the corn gently on the barn floor, while the wind blowing in at one door and out at the other carried away the chaff. The sawin’ or sowing cubbie carried the seed corn in spring. The horse cubbie was used as a muzzle for a horse when necessary. The hen cubbie was suspended as a nest for the domestic fowls. The use of the spoon cubbie, which hung by the side of the fire, needs no explanation. The bait cubbie and the sea cubbie must close our list, the former used for carrying bait, and the latter for the catch of fish. A cubbie was always carried by the beggars who swarmed before the introduction of the poor law, and to “tak’ the cubbie and the staff” was a phrase meaning to be forced to beg one’s bread.

We now come to what I have called inflexible articles. Here we may mention first the _luppie_, once in universal use for holding all sorts of dry materials, such as meal, burstin, eggs, and the like. Luppies were round and barrel-shaped, close in texture, and as firm as a board. They varied much in size, being made from about ten inches to three feet in height. They had a rim round the lower end to protect the bottom, and two “lugs” at the top. Those of the smallest size were used by housewives as work-baskets.

The work on these luppies, and on the straw stools to be mentioned next, was considered the finest and most durable. Small coils or gangs of straw were firmly and closely laced over one another. The lacing cord was of the strongest bent, and the projecting ends of the bent were carefully clipped off. These bands were known as _stool bands_.

We now come to the straw stools or chairs, which were mainly of three kinds. The first was a sort of low, round stool without any back. Such a stool could be easily lifted to or from the fireside, and on an emergency could be instantly converted into a luppie by simply being turned upside down. The next was called the low-backed stool, having a semi-circular back reaching to the shoulders of the sitter. Last comes the high-backed or hooded stool, which was the easy-chair of the Orkney cottage. In later times the seat was always made of wood, in the form of a square box, with a slightly projecting top. Strips of wood were used to support the front edges of the back, and to form elbow rests in front of these. The seat box usually contained a drawer, in which the goodman kept his supply of snuff, and perhaps the few books which made up the cottage library. This form of chair, which is now regarded as the orthodox one, was invented in the middle of the eighteenth century by a native of North Ronaldsay, as the construction of the seat of wood took far less time than working it all in straw; but the older form, with its circular straw seat, and the side slips and elbow rests entirely covered with straw and bent cords, was much more elegant in the lines of its form.

WALTER TRAIL DENNISON.
(_Adapted from “Orcadian Papers.”_)

THE WEATHER OF ORKNEY.

A foreign writer has said that Englishmen grumble more at their weather than at anything else, while it is really the only thing about their country of which they might be proud. His meaning is that, compared with other regions of the world, the climate of Great Britain is singularly free from disagreeable extremes of heat or cold, and of drought or flood. And if this is true of Great Britain as a whole, it is especially true of Orkney. In summer we rarely suffer from heat, and in winter we are equally free from extreme cold. The mean temperature of the whole year in Orkney (45·4°) is little below that of Aberdeen (46·3°), of Alnwick in Northumberland (46·3°), or of Kew near London (49·4°).

The equability of our temperature, or its freedom from all extremes of heat and cold, is due to the influence of the sea. The temperature of the ocean varies only about 13° during the year; it is lowest in February, being 41·6°, while that of the air is 38·6°, and is highest in August, being 54·5°, while that of the air is 54°.

The smallness of the difference between the annual mean temperature of Orkney and that of Kew is really due to the mildness of our winters. Taking the mean of the three winter months, we find that of Orkney to be almost the same as that of Kew, and slightly higher than that of Alnwick. For the three summer months, however, Orkney is three degrees colder than Alnwick and eight degrees colder than Kew. The hottest day in Orkney during the last thirty years only reached 76°, while at Kew 92° was recorded.

The extent to which the sea influences our climate can best be seen by comparing it with that of an inland or continental station of similar latitude. Winnipeg, in the province of Manitoba, formerly well known to Orkney men as Fort Garry in the Red River Settlement, lies in nearly the same latitude as London. Its mean temperature, however, during the three winter months is only 0·9°, or thirty-one degrees below freezing-point, and thirty-eight degrees lower than that of Orkney; in summer it is 66°, or thirteen degrees above that of Orkney.

Not only is our climate ruled by the sea; it is ruled by a sea whose waters are themselves somewhat warmer than their latitude might lead us to expect. The temperature of the ocean is often affected by currents, bringing water either from warmer or from colder regions. In the case of the ocean waters round our coasts, the movement is from the south-west. This movement is due at first to the Gulf Stream, which carries a great mass of warm water from the Gulf of Mexico into the North Atlantic, and afterwards to a surface drift caused by the prevailing south-westerly winds.

Our coast waters are therefore somewhat warmer than they would be if there were no such movement, and much warmer than if there were a current in the opposite direction, sweeping along the shores of Norway from the northern ocean. If we compare our climate with that of Nain, in Labrador, which lies in nearly the same latitude, and is also on the Atlantic coast, we shall see how much depends upon the ocean currents. The cold Arctic current which washes the Labrador coast, bringing with it melting icebergs, snow, and fog, reduces the mean annual temperature of Nain to less than 26°, more than nineteen degrees below that of Orkney.

While the climate of oceanic islands is benefited by the equable temperature of the ocean, it is often marked by excessive moisture and rainfall. Yet even in this matter we shall see that Orkney has little to complain of, while, of course, serious droughts are practically unknown.

Scotland, though small in area, shows great inequality in the distribution of its rainfall, due to the diversity of its surface and to the fact that most of its rain is brought by westerly winds. Districts near the west coast, especially if mountainous, have a much greater rainfall than those towards the east, which are also on the whole less elevated. Thus considerable portions of the West Highlands have an annual rainfall of over 80 inches, Ben Nevis recording over 150. Many parts of the eastern Lowlands, on the other hand, have only 30 inches or less; and Cromarty, which is the driest station in Scotland, has only 23 inches.

Compared with the mainland of Scotland, then, it does not seem that the climate of our islands gives us much cause for grumbling, for our annual rainfall varies from 37·7 inches at Sandwick to 30·7 at Start Point in Sanday. Our wettest months are October, November, and December, during which we receive from one-third to one-half of our yearly rainfall; our driest months are April, May, and June, which together give us only one-eighth of the total.

One fact about rain is sometimes overlooked: in cool climates rain brings heat. This may not be noticeable at the time, but its general effect can be observed. Just as it requires heat to turn water into vapour, and as evaporation always produces cold, so the change back again from vapour into water sets free some of this heat, raising the temperature of the air, of the rain itself, and of the land on which it falls. Much of the warming effect of our westerly winds is due not to the direct warmth of the Gulf Stream, as used to be supposed, but simply to the fact that these winds are rain-carrying winds. They thus bring to us the benefit of that solar heat which far away to the south-west caused the vapour to rise from the surface of the ocean.

The chief difference between our weather and that of Scotland is, perhaps, the greater prevalence of high winds in Orkney. The land being low, our islands are swept by the full force of the gales so common in the North Atlantic. When speaking of winds, it may be useful to remember the classification which is recognized by the Meteorological Office. A wind moving at the rate of thirteen miles an hour is called a light breeze; forty miles represents the velocity of a moderate gale, and fifty-six miles a strong gale; seventy-five miles an hour is the speed of a storm, and ninety miles that of a hurricane. We have the record of only one hurricane, on November 17, 1893, with a velocity of ninety-six miles. Several gales of over eighty miles have been experienced, and one summer gale of seventy-five miles in the year 1890. During the fifteen years 1890 to 1904 three hundred gales were recorded in Orkney, while Alnwick experienced only one hundred and fifty-seven, and Valencia, on the west coast of Ireland, one hundred and thirty for the same period. Fleetwood, on the coast of Lancashire, however, had a record of three hundred and six gales during those years.

Every Orcadian must have noticed a type of weather which is common all the year round, but especially so in winter. On a blue sky wisps of cirrus or “mare’s-tail” cloud appear in patches. Gradually these increase till they form a continuous haze, in which a lunar halo or “broch,” and occasionally solar halos or “sun-dogs,” may be seen. Then the wind, which was light and probably westerly, backs to the southward and eastward, and the sky becomes threatening. The wind increases, perhaps to a moderate gale, and rain falls heavily. The wind then shifts towards the south and south-west, increasing in force, sometimes quite suddenly, or it may change still further round towards the north. Meantime the barometer, which has been low and falling, begins to rise briskly, and the weather clears.

To understand how this common series of weather changes comes about, a little knowledge of cyclones is necessary. A cyclone is a movement in the air resembling a whirlwind; the cyclones of the Indian Ocean and the China seas, indeed, are real whirlwinds of the most violent and destructive type. In the North Atlantic they exist for the most part as enormous eddies in the great air-ocean, often several hundreds of miles in diameter, probably rotating with the force of a gale near the centre, and at the same time moving forward as a whole at a moderate speed. A cyclone has been known to keep company with one of our Atlantic liners during its whole voyage, but the rate of progress is often less than this.

A cyclone owes its origin to some local excess of heat, such as might arise from a heavy rainfall, the heat causing an upward movement in the air. The inrush of cool air which then follows begins a circular or whirling motion. The moist air in front of the cyclone gives up its moisture with the fall in temperature, causing the rains that are invariably found in front of such a movement. The air after the rainfall is dry and warmer, and its ascent keeps up a partial vacuum or area of low pressure, which is the centre or vent of the cyclone. It is really the rainfall in front of the cyclonic system that causes its forward movement, assisted by the rotation of the earth. Each space relieved of its moisture forms in its turn the new centre. A coast-line, or an anti-cyclonic movement of the air in front of a cyclone, will alter its course. When one reaches the shores of Europe, it soon spends itself for want of the moisture-laden winds in front to keep up the system.

In the northern hemisphere the direction of rotation of a cyclone is opposite to the movement of the hands of a watch; in the southern hemisphere it is in the same direction as the movement of the hands of a watch. This is the effect of the rotation of the earth, as will be clear after a little thought on the matter. In the North Atlantic the forward motion of a cyclone is always from the westward to the eastward; hence the “storm warnings” which reach us from the United States.

Our islands lie in the most common track of those Atlantic cyclones, and the centre of the whirl often passes over or near the Orkneys. Now if you will look at the chart or diagram of a typical cyclone as given here, and suppose it to be moving slowly from south-east to north-west, or suppose yourself to be moving through it in the opposite direction while it remains still, you will see how the changes of wind and weather which we have described must result from this movement.

During the greater part of the year our weather is mainly due to a constant procession of those Atlantic cyclones, great and small, and hence arises the changeableness of our winds and our weather. But in the spring we often have weather of a different type. Our winds are then often cold, sometimes dry, and frequently easterly or northerly in direction for several days together. Such weather is due to anti-cyclones—that is, areas of high pressure, from which the air flows downwards and spreads outwards in every direction. An anti-cyclone is the opposite of a cyclone in almost every respect. Its supply of dry air often comes from the ascending air in the centre of a cyclone, which has deposited its moisture. At the meteorological station on Ben Nevis it was sometimes noticed that when an anti-cyclone was stationed over the south of England, and a cyclone was crossing the north of Scotland, there was an upper air-current travelling from the latter to the former, and no doubt supplying the dry air of the anti-cyclone. This is a type of movement which is usually found over land rather than sea, and it has not the regular forward movement of the cyclone.

The last point which we may notice about our weather is the amount of sunshine which we receive. At every well-equipped observatory, such as that of Deerness, there is an instrument which records the duration of sunshine, hour by hour and day by day, all the year round. In the matter of sunshine, Orkney is not so badly treated as we may sometimes think. The average number of hours of sunshine each year recorded at Deerness is 1,177, while Edinburgh enjoys only 1,166. London is a little better, with 1,260, while Hastings, on the more favoured south coast of England, has an average record of 1,780 hours. Our brightest month is May, with an average of 178 hours of sunshine, and our gloomiest month is naturally December, with only 20·6 hours.

THE PLACE-NAMES OF ORKNEY.

Orkney place-names form an attractive subject of study. There is always some reason why a certain place received its own particular name, though that reason may often be difficult to discover. The use of a name is, of course, to distinguish one place from other places of a similar class, and the most obvious way of doing so is to refer to some special feature or peculiarity of the place. In this way arise such names as the Red Head, the North Sea, the Muckle Water, and Green Holm. Houses and farms and islands are often named after the owner.

When people of a different race and language settle in a country, or when the language changes, as happened in Orkney after its annexation to Scotland, the old names may still be used, although when their meaning is unknown or has been forgotten they are apt to be changed in various ways. People rarely take the trouble of inventing a new name for a place if they can find out the name already given to it. Thus if there had been any Celtic or Pictish inhabitants left in Orkney when the Norsemen settled there, the Celtic names of the islands and hills and bays would have been handed down from them to us. But all the old place-names in Orkney are Norse, and the only Celtic elements found in them refer to the settlements and churches of the Culdees, as we have already mentioned.

The Norse place-names are usually descriptive, based either on the appearance or the situation of the place, or on the name of its occupier. Such names have an interest which is entirely wanting in the modern names given to farms or houses, names which are often selected for absurd or trivial reasons. There is little need for inventing any new names in a land which has been so fully supplied with them already. For it is not only the various islands and their most prominent physical features that bear descriptive Norse names; hillock and meadow, field and spring, rock, geo, and skerry—all have been named by our forefathers with names of which the form as well as the meaning is now in many cases forgotten. Those names should be regarded as relics entrusted to our care, and we ought to learn them from the old people by whom they are still remembered, and preserve them from alteration or oblivion, as the material relics of our romantic history are now being preserved from destruction and decay.

_Orkney_, the general name of the island group, is partly Celtic and partly Norse. Pliny, the Roman geographer, mentions _Cape Orcas_, probably Duncansby Head in Caithness, and calls the islands _Orcades_. The Celtic Scots called them the _Orc Islands_, and southern writers use the form _Orcanig_. The root of the name is supposed to be _orc_, which meant the bottlenose whale. The Norse visitors added the termination _-ey_, meaning “island.”

When the Norsemen settled in these islands, they gave to each a name in their own language, and these names have been preserved with little alteration, though their meaning has generally been forgotten. Some were named from their configuration or appearance, as Hoy (_Ha-ey_), the high island; Flotta (_Flat-ey_), the flat island; Sanday, the sand island; Eday, the island of the _eith_ or isthmus; Burray (_Borgar-ey_), the islands of the “brochs.” Some were named from their position, as Westray, the west island; Auskerry, the east skerry. Some were named after persons as Rousay, Rolf’s island; Gairsay (_Gareksey_), Garek’s island; Graemsay (_Grimsey_), Grim’s island; Copinsay, Kolbein’s island. The name _Rinansey_, the island of St. Ninian, often called Ringan, was afterwards changed to Ronaldsay, with “North” prefixed to distinguish it from the original Rognvald’s island, now South Ronaldsay. A few were named from their uses, as Faray, the sheep island; and Hrossey, the horse island, an old name for the Mainland (_Meginland_), or principal island of the group.

It is very odd to find in books and on maps the Latin name _Pomona_ applied to this last island—Pomona, the Roman goddess of harvest-plenty, whose name was also used to indicate the fruits of the earth. The explanation seems to be that a mistake was made by George Buchanan, the greatest Latin scholar whom Scotland ever produced, in quoting a passage from Solinus, an old Latin writer. Solinus, speaking of some island which he calls Thylé or Thulé, says that it is five days’ sail from the Orcades, and that it is large and rich in the constant yield of its harvests (_pomona_). Buchanan, who knew much of Latin but little of either Thulé or the Orcades, takes this to mean that “Thulé is large and Pomona is rich and fertile,” and he concludes from this that Pomona must be the chief island of the Orcades. Thus by a mere blunder the name “Pomona” was given to the Mainland; but there is no good reason why we should perpetuate this blunder. “Mainland” is the name which every intelligent Orcadian should use. It is believed by some that the use of the word _pomona_ itself is due to another blunder, the mistake of a copyist, and that what Solinus really wrote was a contracted form of a word which simply meant fruit.

Our place-names have suffered much from the blunders of surveyors and map-makers who knew nothing of the Norse language. Whenever they found a name which bore some resemblance to an English word, they immediately changed it into what they supposed to be its correct English form. A good example of a name thus “corrected” for us is that of the place now called “Walls.” The proper name of the district is _Waas_, and this is the name which it should bear on the map. But the intelligent surveyors no doubt knew that there is an English word “walls” which is pronounced “wa’s” in Scotland, and so they assumed that the Norse place-name “Waas” ought to be written and pronounced “Walls.” This is of course an absurd error. “Waas” is a form of “Voes,” a name which is admirably suited to the district, the land of the voes or bays.

The name of our county town, Kirkwall, has been similarly disguised by the well-meaning reforms of ignorant persons. Old people in the islands still call it “Kirkwaa,” and this is the correct form of the name. The Peerie Sea was called the “Kirk-voe” long before St. Magnus Cathedral was built, the name being derived from the old church of St. Olaf, whose doorway still exists, and this name, applied to the town, naturally changed into “Kirkwaa.” It would probably be impossible now to restore the old name; we can only be grateful that our map-makers did not also turn “kirk” into the English form “church.” We may suspect that the parish name Holm has been similarly tampered with. The local pronunciation, which is “Ham,” indicates that the name may be derived from _hafn_, a harbour, as in “Hamnavoe” (_Hafnarvagr_) and other cases, but has no connection with _holm_, which means a small island. When the meaning of _hafn_ had been forgotten, and the local pronunciation was ignored, the name was naturally supposed to be connected with the _holms_ which lie off the shore.

A similar intrusion of the letter _l_ is found in _Pierowall_, and also in _Noltland_, in Westray. The latter is sometimes, and more correctly, written as “Notland.” The Norse name was _Nautaland_, the pasture for “nowt” or cattle. The word _Pentland_ must be our last example of such blunders. To the Norsemen the Scottish mainland was _Pettland_, the land of the Picts; and even at the present day Orcadians, who have not been misled by books and maps, still speak of the “Pettland Firth.”

The names of farms or small districts are often very interesting. A common termination in these is _-bister_, which represents the Norse _bolstadr_, a farmsteading, the first part of the name usually being derived from the name of the original owner, as in “Grimbister” and “Swanbister,” the farm of Grim and of Sweyn. The word is connected with _bol_, a dwelling, which still exists in our local dialect in the form “beul,” meaning a stall in a byre or stable. Two Norse words, _bu_ and _bær_, meaning a home or a household, give rise respectively to the common farm name Bu, and to several names ending in _-by_, as Houseby and Dounby.

The termination _-ster_ or _-setter_, which is also very common, represents the Norse word _setr_; the name _saeter_ is still used in Norway for a summer pasture among the hills at some distance from the farm. Several of our farms bear the name of Seatter, and the number of compounds of this word is too large to need illustration.

_Garth_, which meant an enclosure, is akin to the English words _yard_ and _garden_, and is found in numerous farm names, sometimes alone, but more frequently in compounds, where it appears as the termination _-ger_, the _g_ being sounded hard. Other names for enclosed land were _quoy_ (_kvi_) and _town_ (_tun_), and in almost every district we find farm names in which these words appear. The Norse _skali_, a hall, appears as _skaill_, either alone or as an element in compound names. There are other common terminations which might be mentioned, all of them significant and worthy of study, but these may suffice to illustrate how full of meaning and interest our common place-names really are.

We have said that the Norse word for “island” now appears as the termination _-ay_ or _-a_. This termination, however, has in some cases a different origin, especially where the name does not refer to an island. Thus in the names Scapa and Hoxa the _-a_ is a contraction of _eith_, meaning an isthmus. Scapa was _Skalpeith_, the ship-isthmus, and Hoxa was _Haugseith_, the isthmus of the haug or howe. In the name of the island of Sanday, the termination means “island;” in the name Sanday applied to several places round Deer Sound, the reference is to the “Sand aith” or isthmus already mentioned. In names of places such as Birsay and Swannay, where a large burn is found, we may conclude that the _-ay_ represents the Norse _-a_, meaning a river, as the _o_ does in Thurso.

As we should expect from a seafaring race, the Norsemen have left us a very liberal heritage of names for the various natural features of our shores. Projecting points of land are called “ness” or “moul” or “taing,” according to their configuration, and even the less prominent rocks are still known as “clett” or “skerry,” or bear other names which were originally simple descriptions of their peculiar forms. In the same way descriptive names were applied to the water features, and every “voe” and “sound,” every “hope” and “geo” have names which offer us a fine field for study.

In dealing with this last class of names, there are two Norse words which may cause us some trouble—_hella_, a flat rock, and _hellir_, a cave, both of which appear in place-names as _hellya_, while a third word _helgr_, holy, sometimes assumes the same form. It is impossible to determine what the original form and meaning of a name have been unless we examine the place as well as its name.

In studying our place-names, we ought to remember that the correct names are those that are used by the old people who live in the district, not those that are found on the map, or are used by people who adopt the pronunciation suggested by the spelling. By means of the knowledge of a few dozen common Norse roots, and a careful examination of the places to which the names belong, most of our old-fashioned place-names may be made to yield up their ancient meanings, and to throw some light upon the past condition of the islands. When studied in this way, our place-names are seen to be fragments of fossil history, organic remains of an early stratum of society, as eloquent of the past as are the geological fossils of the early ages of plant and animal life.