Hills of Orkney--Their Geologic Composition--Scene of Scott's
"Pirate"--Stromness--Geology of the District--"Seeking
beasts"--Conglomerate in contact with Granite--A palaeozoic Hudson's
Bay--Thickness of Conglomerate of Orkney--Oldest Vertebrate yet
discovered in Orkney--Its Size--Figure of a characteristic plate of
the Asterolepis--Peculiarity of Old Red Fishes--Length of the
Asterolepis--A rich Ichthyolite Bed--Arrangement of the
Layers--Queries as to the Cause of it--Minerals--An abandoned
Mine--A lost Vessel--Kelp for Iodine--A dangerous Coast--Incidents
of Shipwreck--Hospitality--Stromness Museum--Diplopterus mistaken
for Dipterus--Their Resemblances and Differences--Visit to a
remarkable Stack--Paring the Soil for Fuel, and consequent
Barrenness--Description of the Stack--Wave-formed Caves--Height to
which the Surf rises.
The Orkneys, like the mainland of Scotland, exhibit their higher hills
and precipices on their western coasts: the Ward Hill of Hoy attains to
an elevation of sixteen hundred feet; and there are some of the
precipices which skirt the island of which it forms so conspicuous a
feature, that rise sheer over the breakers from eight hundred to a
thousand. Unlike, however, the arrangement on the mainland, it is the
newer rocks that attain to the higher elevations; the heights of Hoy are
composed of that arenaceous upper member of the Lower Old Red
Sandstone,--the last formed of the Palaeozoic deposits of Orkney,--which
overlies the ichthyolitic flagstones and shales of Caithness at Dunnet
Head, and the ichthyolitic nodular beds of Inverness, Ross, and
Cromarty, at Culloden, Tarbet Ness, within the Northern Sutor, and along
the bleak ridge of the Maolbuie. It is simply a tall upper story of the
formation, erected along the western line of coast in the Orkneys, which
the eastern line wholly wants. Its screen of hills forms a noble
background to the prospect which opens on the traveller as he ascends
the eminence beyond the Free Church manse of Frith and Stennis. A large
lake, bare and treeless, like all the other lakes and lochs of Orkney,
but picturesque of outline, and divided into an upper and lower sheet of
water by two low, long promontories, that jut out from opposite sides,
and so nearly meet as to be connected by a threadlike line of road, half
mound, half bridge, occupies the middle distance. There are moory hills
and a few cottages in front; and on the promontories, conspicuous in the
landscape, from the relief furnished by the blue ground of the
surrounding waters, stand the tall stones of Stennis,--one group on the
northern promontory, the other on the south. A gray old-fashioned house,
of no very imposing appearance, rises between the road and the lake. It
is the house of Stennis, or Turmister, in which Scott places some of the
concluding scenes of the "Pirate," and from which he makes Cleveland and
his fantastic admirer Jack Bunce witness the final engagement, in the
bay of Stromness, between the Halcyon sloop of war and the savage Goffe.
Nor does it matter anything that neither sea nor vessels can be seen
from the house of Turmister: the fact which would be so fatal to a
dishonest historian tells with no effect against the honest "_maker_,"
responsible for but the management of his tale.
I got on to Stromness; and finding, after making myself comfortable in
my inn, that I had a fine bright evening still before me, longer by some
three or four degrees of north latitude than the July evenings of
Edinburgh, I set out, hammer in hand, to explore. Stromness is a long,
narrow, irregular strip of a town, fairly thrust by a steep hill into
the sea, on which it encroaches in a broken line of wharf-like bulwarks,
along which, at high water, vessels of a hundred tons burden float so
immediately beside the houses, that their pennants on gala days wave
over the chimney tops. The steep hill forms part of a granitic axis,
about six miles in length by a mile in breadth, which forms the backbone
of the district, and against which the Great Conglomerate and lower
schists of the Old Red are upturned at a rather high angle. It is
wrapped round in some places by a thin caul of the stratified primary
rocks. Immediately over the town, on the brow of the eminence, where the
granitic axis had been laid bare in digging a foundation for the Free
Church manse, I saw numerous masses of schistose-gneiss, passing in some
of the beds into a coarse-grained mica-schist, and a lustrous
hornblendic slate, that had been quarried from over it, and which may be
still seen built up into the garden-wall of the erection. I walked out
towards the west, to examine the junction of the granite and the Great
Conglomerate, where it is laid bare by the sea, little more than a
quarter of a mile outside the town. There was a horde of noisy urchins a
little beyond the inn, who, having seen me alight from the mail-gig, had
determined in their own minds that I was engaged in the political
canvass going forward at the time, but had not quite ascertained my
side. They now divided into two parties; and when the one, as I passed,
set up a "Hurra for Dundas," the other met them from the opposite side
of the street, with a counter cry of "Anderson forever." Immediately
after clearing the houses, I was accosted by a man from the country.
"Ye'll be seeking beasts," he said: "what price are cattle gi'en the
noo?" "Yes, seeking _beasts_," I replied, "but very old ones: I have
come to hammer your rocks for petrified fish." "I see, I see," said the
man; "I took ye by ye'er gray plaid for a drover; but I ken something
about the stane fish too; there's lots o' them in the quarries at
Skaill."
I found the great Conglomerate in immediate contact with the granite,
which is a ternary of the usual components, somewhat intermediate in
color between that of Peterhead and Aberdeen, and which at this point
bears none of the caul of stratified primary rock by which it is
overlaid on the brow of the hill. When the great Conglomerate, which is
mainly composed of it here, was in the act of forming, this granite must
have been one of the surface rocks of the locality, and in no respect a
different stone from what it is now. The widely-spread Conglomerate base
of the Old Red Sandstone, which presents, over an area of so many
thousand square miles, such an identity of character, that specimens
taken from the neighborhood of Lerwick, in Shetland, can scarce be
distinguished from specimens detached from the hills which rise over the
great Caledonian Valley, contains in various places, as under the
Northern Sutor, for instance, and along the shores of Navity, fragments
of rock which have not been detected _in situ_ in the districts in which
they occur as agglomerated pebbles. In general, however, we find it
composed of the debris of those very granites and gneisses which, as in
the case of the granitic axis here, were forced through it, and through
the overlying deposits, by deep-seated convulsions, long posterior in
date to its formation. It appears to have been formed in a vast oceanic
basin of primary rock,--a Palaeozoic Hudson's or Baffin's Bay,--partially
surrounded, mayhap, by bare primary continents, swept by numerous
streams, rapid and headlong, and charged with the broken debris of the
inhospitable regions which they drained. The graptolite-bearing
grauwacke of Banffshire seems to have been the only fossiliferous rock
that occurred throughout the extent of this ancient northern basin. The
Conglomerate of Orkney, like that of Moray and Ross, varies from fifty
to a hundred yards in thickness. It is not overlaid in this section by
the thick bed of coarse-grained sandstone, so well-marked a member of
the formation at Cromarty, Nigg, and Gamrie, and along the northern
shores of the Beauly Frith; but at once passes into those gray
bituminous flagstones so immensely developed in Caithness and the
Orkneys. I traced the formation upwards this evening, walking along the
edges of the upheaved strata, from where the Conglomerate leans against
the granite, till where it merges into the gray flagstones, and then
pursued these from older and lower to newer and higher layers, anxious
to ascertain at what distance over the base the more ancient organisms
of the system first appear, and what their character and kind. And
little more than a hundred _yards_ over the granite, and somewhat less
than a hundred _feet_ over the upper stratum of the great Conglomerate,
I found what I sought,--a well-marked bone, perhaps the oldest
vertebrate remain yet discovered in Orkney, embedded in a light
grayish-colored layer of hard flag.
What, asks the reader, was the character of the ancient denizen of the
Palaeozoic basin of which it had formed a part? Was it a large or small
fish, or of a high or low order? Not certainly of a low order, and by no
means of a small size. The organism in the rock was a specimen of that
curious nail-shaped bone of the Asterolepis which occurs as a central
ridge in the single plate that occupies in this genus the wide curve of
the under jaw, and as it was fully five inches in length from head to
point, the plate to which it belonged must have measured ten inches
across, and the frontal occipital buckler with which it was associated,
one foot two inches in length (not including the three accessory plates
at the nape), by ten inches in breadth. And if built, as it probably
was, in the same massy proportions as its brother Coelacanths the
Holoptychius or Glyptolepis, the individual to which the nail-shaped
bone belonged must have been, judging from the size of the corresponding
parts in these ichthyolites, at least twice as large an animal as the
splendid Clashbennie Holoptychius of the Upper Old Red, now in the
British Museum. The bulkiest icthyolites yet found in any of the
divisions of the Old Red system are of the genus Asterolepis; and to
this genus, and to evidently an individual of no inconsiderable size,
this oldest of the organisms of the Orkney belonged. I was so interested
in the fact, that before leaving this part of the country, I brought Dr.
Garson, Stromness, and Mr. William Watt, jun., Skaill, both very
intelligent palaeontologists, to mark the place and character of the
fossil, that they might be able to point it out to geological visitors
in the future, or, if they preferred removing it to their town Museum,
to indicate to them the stratum in which it had lain. For the present, I
merely request the reader to mark, in the passing, that the most ancient
organic remain yet found in the Old Red of this part of the country,
nay, judging from its place, one of the most ancient yet found in
Scotland,--so far as I know, absolutely the _most_ ancient,--belonged to
a ganoid as bulky as a large porpoise, and which, as shown by its teeth
and jaws, possessed that peculiar organization which characterized the
reptile fish of the Upper Devonian and Carboniferous periods. As there
are, however, no calculations more doubtful or more to be suspected than
those on which the size and bulk of the extinct animals are determined
from some surviving fragment of their remains,--plate or bone,--I must
attempt laying before the scientific reader at least a portion of the
data on which I found.
[Illustration]
This figure represents not inadequately one of the most characteristic
plates of the Asterolepis. A very considerable fragment of what seems to
be the same plate has been figured by Agassiz from a cast of one of the
huge specimens of Professor Asmus ("Old Red," Table 32, Fig. 13); but
as no evidence regarding its true place had turned up at the time it was
supposed by the naturalist to form part of the opercular covering of the
animal. It belonged, however, to a different portion of the head. In
almost all the fish that appear at our tables the space which occurs
within the arched sweep of the lower jaws is mainly occupied by a
complicated osseous mechanism, known to anatomists as the hyoid bone and
branchiostegous rays; and which serves both to support the branchial
arches and the branchiostegous membrane. Now, in the fish of the Old Red
Sandstone, if we except some of the Acanthodians, we find no trace of
this piece of mechanism: the arched space is covered over with dermal
plates of bone, as a window is filled up with panes. Three plates,
resembling very considerably the three divisions of a pointed Gothic
window, furnished with a single central mullion, divided atop into two
branches, occupied the space in the genera Osteolepis and Diplopterus;
and two plates resembling the divisions of a pointed Gothic window,
whose single central mullion does _not_ branch atop, filled it up in the
genera Holoptychius and Glyptolepis. In the genus Asterolepis this
arch-shaped space was occupied, as I have said, by a single plate,--that
represented in the wood-cut; and the nail-shaped bone rose on its
internal surface along the centre,--the nail-head resting immediately
beneath the centre of the arch, and the nail-point bordering on the
isthmus below, at which the two shoulder-bones terminated. Now, in all
the specimens which I have yet examined, the form and proportions of
this plate are such that it can be very nearly inscribed in a
semi-circle, of which the length of the nail is the radius. A nail five
inches in length must have belonged to a plate ten inches in its longer
diameter. I have ascertained further, that this longer diameter was
equal to the shorter diameter of the creature's frontal buckler,
measured across about two thirds of its entire length from the nape; and
that a transverse diameter of ten inches at this point was associated in
the buckler with a longitudinal diameter of fourteen inches from the
nape to the snout. Thus five inches along the nail represent fourteen
inches along the occipital shield. The proportion, however, which the
latter bore to the entire body in this genus has still to be determined.
The corresponding frontal shield in the Coccosteus was equal to about
one-fifth the creature's entire length, and in the Osteolepis and
Diplopterus, to nearly one-seventh its length; while the length of the
_Glyptolepis leptopterus_, a fish of the same family as the Asterolepis,
was about five and a half times that of its occipital shield. If the
Asterolepis was formed in the proportions of the Diplopterus, the
ancient individual to which this nail-like bone belonged must have been
about eight feet two inches in length; but if moulded, as it more
probably was, in the proportions of the Glyptolepis, only six feet five
inches. All the Coelacanths, however, were exceedingly massive in
proportion to their length; they were fish built in the square,
muscular, thick-set, Dirk-Hatterick and Balfour-of-Burley style; and of
the Russian specimens, some of the larger bones must have belonged to
individuals of from twice to thrice the length of the Stromness one.
Passing upwards along the strata, step by step, as along a fallen stair,
each stratum presenting a nearly perpendicular front, but losing, in the
downward slant of the _tread_, as a carpenter would say, the height
attained in the _rise_, I came, about a quarter of a mile farther to the
west, and several hundred feet higher in the formation, upon a fissile
dark-colored bed, largely charged with ichthyolites. The fish I found
ranged in three layers,--the lower layer consisting almost exclusively
of Dipterians, chiefly Osteolepides; the middle layer, of Acanthodians,
of the genera Cheiracanthus and Diplacanthus; and the upper layer, of
Cephalaspides, mostly of one species, the _Coccosteus decipiens_. I
found exactly the same arrangement in a bed considerably higher in the
system, which occurs a full mile farther on,--the Dipterians at the
bottom, the Acanthodians in the middle, and the Cephalaspides atop; and
was informed by Mr. William Watt, a competent authority in the case,
that the arrangement is comparatively a common one in the quarries of
Orkney. How account for the phenomenon? How account for the three
storeys, and the apportionment of the floors, like those of a great
city, each to its own specific class of society? Why should the first
floor be occupied by Osteolepides, the second by Cheiracanthi and their
congeners, and the third by Coccostei? Was the arrangement an effect of
normal differences in the constitutions of the several families,
operated upon by some deleterious gas or mineral poison, which, though
it eventually destroyed the whole, did not so simultaneously, but
consecutively,--the families of weakest constitution first, and the
strongest last? Or were they exterminated by some disease, that seized
upon the families, not at once, but in succession? Or did they visit the
locality serially, as the haddock now visits our coasts in spring, and
the herring towards the close of summer; and were then killed off,
whether by poison or disease, as they came? These are questions which
may never be conclusively answered. It is well, however, to observe, as
a curious geological fact, that peculiar arrangement of the fossils by
which they are suggested, and to record the various instances in which
it occurs. The minerals which I remarked among the schists here as most
abundant are a kind of black ironstone, exceedingly tough and hard,
occurring in detached masses, and a variety of bright pyrites
disseminated among the darker flagstones, either as irregularly-formed,
brassy-looking concretions of small size, or spread out on their
surfaces in thin leaf-like films, that resemble, in some of the
specimens, the icy-foliage with which a severe frost encrusts a
window-pane. Still further on I came upon a vein of galena; but a
miner's excavation in the solid rock, a little above high-water mark,
quite as dark and nearly as narrow as a fox-earth, showed me that it had
been known long before, and, as the workings seemed to have been
deserted for ages, known to but little purpose. The crystals of ore,
small and thinly scattered, are embedded in a matrix of barytes,
stromnite, and other kindred minerals, and the thickness of the entire
vein is not very considerable. I have since learned, from the
"Statistical Account of the Parish of Sandwick," that the workings of
the mine penetrate into the rock for about a hundred yards, but that it
has been long abandoned, "as a speculation which would not pay."
I observed scattered over the beach, in the neighborhood of the lead
mine, considerable quantities of the hard chalk of England; and, judging
there could be no deposits of the hard chalk in this neighborhood, I
addressed myself on my way back, to a kelp-burner engaged in wrapping up
his fire for the night with a thick covering of weed, to ascertain how
it had come there. "Ah, master," he replied, "that chalk is all that
remains of a fine large English vessel, that was knocked to pieces here
a few years ago. She was ballasted with the chalk; and as it is a light
sort of stone, the surf has washed it ashore from that low reef in the
middle of the tideway where she struck and broke up. Most of the
sailors, poor fellows, lie in the old churchyard, beside the broken ruin
yonder. It is a deadly shore this to seafaring-men." I had understood
that the kelp-trade was wholly at an end in Orkney; and, remarking that
the sea-weed which he employed was chiefly of one kind,--the long brown
fronds of tang dried in the sun,--I inquired of him to what purpose the
substance was now employed, seeing that barilla and the carbonate of
soda had supplanted it in the manufacture of soap and glass, and why he
was so particular in selecting his weed. "It's some valuable medicine,"
he said, "that's made of the kelp now: I forget its name; but it's used
for bad sores and cancer; and we must be particular in our weed, for
it's not every kind of weed that has the medicine in't. There's most of
it, we're told, in the leaves of the tang." "Is the name of the drug," I
asked, "iodine?" "Ay, that must be just it," he replied,--"iodine; but
it doesn't make such a demand for kelp as the glass and the soap." I
afterwards learned that the kelp-burner's character of this strip of
coast, as peculiarly fatal to the mariner, was borne out by many a sad
casualty, too largely charged with the wild and the horrible to be
lightly forgotten. The respected Free Church clergyman of Stromness, Mr.
Learmonth, informed me that, ere the Disruption, while yet minister of
the parish, there were on one sad occasion eight dead bodies carried of
a Sabbath morning to his manse door. Some of the incidents connected
with these terrible shipwrecks, as related with much graphic effect by a
boatman who carried me across the sound, on an exploratory ramble to the
island of Hoy, struck me as of a character considerably beyond the reach
of the mere dealer in fiction. The master of one hapless vessel, a young
man, had brought his wife and only child with him on the voyage destined
to terminate so mournfully; and when the vessel first struck, he had
rushed down to the cabin to bring them both on deck, as their only
chance of safety. He had, however, unthinkingly shut the cabin-door
after him; a second tremendous blow, as not unfrequently happens in
such cases, so affected the framework of the sides and deck, that the
door was jammed fast in its frame. And long ere it could be cut
open,--for no human hand could unfasten it,--the vessel had filled to
the beams, and neither the master nor his wife and child were ever seen
more. In another ship, wrecked within a cable-length of the beach, the
mate, a man of Herculean proportions, and a skilful swimmer, stripped
and leaped overboard, not doubting his ability to reach the shore. But
he had failed to remark what in such circumstances is too often
forgotten, that the element on which he flung himself, beaten into foam
against the shallows, was, according to Mr. Bremner's shrewd definition,
not water, but a mixture of water and air, specifically lighter than the
human body; and so at the shore, though so close at hand, he never
arrived, disappearing almost at the vessel's side. "The ground was
rough," said my informant, "and the sea ran mountains high; and I can
scarce tell you how I shuddered on finding, long ere his corpse was
thrown up, his two eyes detached from their sockets, staring from a
wreath of sea-weed." There is in this last circumstance, horrible enough
surely for the wildest German tale ever written, a unique singularity,
which removes it beyond the reach of invention.
At my inn I found a pressing invitation awaiting me from the Free Church
manse, which I was urged to make my home so long as I remained in that
part of the country. A geologist, however, fairly possessed by the
enthusiasm without which weak man can accomplish nothing,--whether he be
a deer-stalker or mammoth-fancier, or angle for live salmon or dead
Pterichthyes,--has a trick of forgetting the right times of dining and
taking tea, and of throwing the burden of his bodily requirements on
early extempore breakfasts and late suppers; and so reporting myself a
man of irregular habits and bad hours, whose movements could not in the
least be depended upon, I had to decline the hospitality which would
fain have adopted me as its guest, notwithstanding the badness of the
character that, in common honesty, I had to certify as my own. Next
morning I breakfasted at the manse, and was introduced by Mr. Learmonth
to two gentlemen of the place, who had been kindly invited to meet with
me, and who, from their acquaintance with the geology of the district
enabled me to make the best use of my time, by cutting direct on those
cliffs and quarries in the neighborhood in which organic remains had
been detected, instead of wearily re-discovering them for myself. There
is a small but interesting museum in Stromness, rich in the fossils of
the locality; and I began the geologic business of the day by devoting
an hour to the examination of its organisms, chiefly ichthyolites. I saw
among them several good specimens of the genus Pterichthys, and of what
is elsewhere one of the rarer genera of the Dipterians,--the
Diplopterus. A well-marked individual of the latter genus had, I found,
been misnamed Dipterus by some geological visitor who had recently come
the way,--a mistake which, as in both ichthyolites the fins are
similarly placed, occasionally occurs, but which may be easily avoided,
when the specimens are in a tolerable state of preservation, by taking
note of a few well-marked characteristics by which the genera are
distinguished. In both Dipterus and Diplopterus the bright enamel of the
scales was thickly punctulated by microscopic points,--the exterior
terminations of funnel-shaped openings, that communicated between the
surface and the cells of the middle table of the scale; but the form of
the scales themselves was different,--that of the Dipterus being nearly
circular, and that of the Diplopterus, save on the dorsal ridge,
rhomboidal. Again, the lateral line of the Diplopterus was a raised
line, running as a ridge along the scales; whereas that of the Dipterus
was a depressed one, existing as a furrow. Their heads, too, were
covered by an entirely dissimilar arrangement of plates. The rounded
snout-plate of the Diplopterus was suddenly contracted to nearly
one-half its breadth by two semi-circular inflections, which formed the
orbits of the eyes; full in the centre, a little above these, a minute,
lozenge-shaped plate seemed as if inlaid in the larger one, the
analogue, apparently, of the anterior frontal; and over all there
expanded a broad plate, the superior frontal, half divided vertically by
a line drawn downwards from the nape, which, however, stopped short in
the middle; and fretted transversely by two small but deeply-indented
rectangular marks, which, crossing from the central to two lateral
plates, assumed the semblance of connecting pins. The snout of the
Dipterus was less round; it bore no mark of the eye-orbits; and the
frontal buckler, broader in proportion to its length than that of the
Diplopterus, consisted of many more plates. I may here mention that the
frontal buckler of Diplopterus has not yet been figured nor described;
whereas that of Dipterus, though unknown as such, has been given to the
world as the occipital covering of a supposed Cephalaspian,--the
Polyphractus. Polyphractus is, however, in reality a synonym for
Dipterus,--the one name being derived from a peculiarity of the animal's
fins: the other, from the great number of its occipital plates. There is
no science founded on mere observation that can be altogether free, in
its earlier stages, from mistakes of this character,--mistakes to which
the palaeontologist, however skilful, is peculiarly liable. The teeth of
the two genera were essentially different. Those of the Dipterus,
exclusively palatal, were blunt and squat, and ranged in two
rectangular patches;[22] while those of the Diplopterus bristled along
its jaws and were slender and sharp. Their tails, too, though both
heterocercal, were diverse in their type. In each, an angular strip of
gradually-diminishing scales,--a prolongation of the scaly coat which
protected the body, and which covered here a prolongation of the
vertebral column,--ran on to the extreme termination of the upper lobe;
but there was in the Diplopterus a greatly larger development of fin on
the superior or dorsal side of the scaly strip than on that of the
Dipterus. If the caudal fin of the Osteolepis be divided longitudinally
into six equal parts, it will be found that one of these occurs on the
upper side of the vertebral prolongation, and five on the under; in the
caudal fin of the Diplopterus so divided, rather more than _two_ parts
will be found to occur on the upper side, and rather less than four on
the under; while in the caudal fin of the Dipterus the development seems
to have been restricted to the under side exclusively; at least, in none
of the many individuals which I have examined have I found any trace of
caudal rays on the upper side. These are minute and somewhat trivial
particulars; but the geologist may find them of use; and the
non-geologist may be disposed to extend to them some little degree of
tolerance, when he considers that they distinguished two largely
developed genera of animals, to which the Author of all did not deem it
unworthy his wisdom to impart, in the act of creation, certain marked
points of resemblance, and other certain points of dissimilarity.
From the Museum, accompanied by one of the gentlemen to whom Mr.
Learmonth had introduced me at breakfast, and who obligingly undertook
to act as my guide on the occasion, I set out to visit a remarkable
stack on the sea-coast, about four miles north and west of Stromness. We
scaled together the steep granitic hill immediately over the town, and
then cut on the stack, straight as the bird flies, across a trackless
common, bare and stony, and miserably pared by the _flaughter_ spade.
The landed proprietors in this part of the mainland are very numerous,
and their properties small; and there are vast breadths of undivided
common that encircle their little estates, as the Atlantic encircles the
Orkneys. But the state in which I found the unappropriated parts of the
district had in no degree the effect of making me an opponent of
appropriation or the landholders. Our country, had it been left as a
whole to all its people, as the Communist desiderates, would ere now be
of exceedingly little value to any portion of them. The soil of the
Orkney commons has been so repeatedly pared off and carried away for
fuel, that there are now wide tracts on which there is no more soil to
pare, and which present, for the original covering of peaty mould, a
continuous surface of pale boulder-clay, here and there mottled by
detached tufts of scraggy heath, and here and there roughened by
projections of the underlying rock. All is unredeemable barrenness. On
the other hand, wherever a bit of private property appears, though in
the immediate neighborhood of these ruined wastes, the surface is
swarded over, and the soil is the better, not the worse, for the
services which it has rendered to man in the past. Whatever the Chartist
and the Leveller may think of the matter, it is, I find, virtually on
behalf of the many that the soil has been appropriated by the few. After
passing from off the tract of moor which overlies the granitic axis of
the district, to a tract equally moory which spreads over the gray
flagstones, I marked, more especially in the hollows and ravines, where
minute springs ooze from the rock, vast quantities of bog-iron embedded
in the soil, and presenting greatly the appearance of the scoria of a
smith's forge. The apparent scoria here is simply a reproduction of the
iron of the underlying flagstones, transferred, through the agency of
water, to that stratum of vegetable mould and boulder-clay which
represents the recent period.
I found the stack which I had been brought to see forming the
picturesque centre of a bold tract of rock scenery. It stands out from
the land as a tall insulated tower, about two hundred feet in height,
sorely worn at its base by the breakers that ceaselessly fret against
its sides, but considerably broader atop, where it bears a flat cover of
sward on the same level with the tops of the precipices which in the
lapse of ages have receded from around it. Like the sward-crested
hammock left by a party of laborers, to mark the depth to which they
have cut in removing a bank or digging a pond, it remains to indicate
how the attrition of the surf has told upon the iron-bound coast;
demonstrating that lines of precipices hard as iron, and of giddy
elevation, are in full retreat before the dogged perseverance of an
assailant that, though baffled in each single attack, ever returns to
the charge, and gains by an aggregation of infinitesimals,--the result
of the whole. From the edge of a steep promontory that commands an
inflection of the coast, and of the wall of rock which sweeps round it,
I watched for a few seconds the sea,--greatly heightened at the time by
the setting in of the flood-tide,--as it broke, surge after surge,
against the base of the tall dark precipices; and marked how it
accomplished its work of disintegration. The flagstone deposit here
abounds in vertical cracks and flaws; and in the line of each of the
many fissures which these form the waves have opened up a cave; so that
for hundreds of yards together the precipices seem as if founded on
arch-divided piers, and remind one of those ancient prints or drawings
of Old London Bridge in which a range of tall sombre buildings is
represented as rising high over a line of arches; or of rows of lofty
houses in those cities of southern Europe in which the dwellings
fronting the streets are perforated beneath by lines of squat piazzas,
and present above a dingy and windowless breadth of wall. In course of
time the piers attenuate and give way; the undermined precipices topple
down, parting from the solid mass behind in those vertical lines by
which they are traversed at nearly right angles with their line of
stratification; the perpendicular front which they had covered comes to
be presented, in consequence, to the sea; its faults and cracks
gradually widen into caves, as those of the fallen front had gradually
widened at an earlier period; in the lapse of centuries, it too,
resigning its place, topples over headlong, an undermined mass; the
surge dashes white and furious where the dense rock had rested before;
and thus, in its slow but irresistible march, the sea gains upon the
land. In the peculiar disposition and character of the prevailing strata
of Orkney, as certainly as in the power of the tides which sweep athwart
its coasts, and the wide extent of sea which, stretching around it,
gives the waves scope to gather bulk and momentum, may be found the
secret of the extraordinary height to which the surf sometimes rises
against its walls of rock. During the fiercer tempests, masses of foam
shoot upwards against the precipices, like inverted cataracts, fully two
hundred feet over the ordinary tide-level, and, washing away the looser
soil from their summits, leaves in its place patches of slaty gravel,
resembling that of a common sea-beach. Rocks less perpendicular,
however great the violence of the wind and sea, would fail to project
upwards bodies of surf to a height so extraordinary. But the low angle
at which the strata lie, and the rectangularity maintained in relation
to their line of bed by the fissures which traverse them, give to the
Orkney precipices,--remarkable for their perpendicularity and their
mural aspect,--exactly the angle against which the waves, as broken
masses of foam, beat up to their greatest possible altitude. On a tract
of iron-bound coast that skirts the entrance of the Cromarty Frith I
have seen the surf rise, during violent gales from the north-west
especially, against one rectangular rock, known as the White Rock, fully
an hundred feet; while against scarcely any of the other precipices,
more sloping, though equally exposed, did it rise more than half that
height.