Rock-cut chamber tombs are reasonably common in the Mediterranean, but the only one to be found in Scotland is to be found on Hoy. The massive sandstone block was carved out about 4,000 years ago, forming a space that has been said to look like a bedroom with a hole on top. The legend in the late sixteenth century was that a giant was imprisoned here by another and gnawed his way out through the roof, though when Martin Martin visited the site around a 100 years later he heard the tradition that a giant couple had found shelter there. His description was most domestic:
....at one of the ends within this Stone there is a cut out Bed and Pillow, capable of two Persons to lie in: At the other opposite end, there is a void space cut out resembling a Bed, and above both of these there is a large Hole, which is suppos'd was a vent for Smoak.
Considered as a worked stone it is immense, and the obvious labour involved in cutting it must have suggested giant strength. As accommodation however, the Dwarfie Stane would hardly be comfortable for any but a very small giant and his wife, especially if she was pregnant as suggested by the hollowing of her side of the bed. John Brand, writing in 1703, doubts the tale that a giant couple 'had this stone for their Castle':
I would rather think, seeing it could not accomodate any of a Gigantick stature, that it might be for the use of some Dwarf, as the Name seems to import, or it being remote from any House might be the retired Cell of some Melancholick Hermite.
A number of travellers from at least the eighteenth century onward have added graffiti to the tomb, inside and out. One name is that of the well-known antiquary Hugh Miller, and another of 'a Persian gentleman', Guilemus Mounsey, who apparently slept a couple of nights in the stone in 1850, and have the Hoy locals a fright when he appeared from inside in his flowing eastern robes.
Sir Walter Scott probably visited in August 1814 and refers to the site in The Pirate (1821):
The lonely shepherd avoids the place, for at sunrise, high noon, or sunset, the mis-shapen form of the necromantic owner may sometimes still be sitting by the Dwarfie Stone.
The 'necromantic owner' is named as Trolld, 'a dwarf famous in the northern sagas'. By this Scott means a troll, an ogre-like being that figures prominently in Scandinavian legend, but which has mutated in Orkney and Shetland lore as a trow or trowie, much closer to a fairy.
The Lore Of Scotland - A Guide To Scottish Legends
Westwood & Kingshill
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Maes Howe or Maeshowe is among the finest chambered tombs in Europe, dating from around 2700 BCE. It was said to be inhabited by a creature known as a Hogboy, but human beings too left their mark on the site. When it was excavated in 1861, the archaeologists found they were not the first on the scene: Vikings had broken, about 700 years earlier, and left graffiti on the walls. The presence of the twelfth-century vandals is recorded in twenty-four runic inscriptions, two of which refer to 'Jorsalafara' - literally, 'Jerusalem-farers', or crusaders.
The sort of things prople write on walls hasn't changed all that much over the centuries.
Thorny bedded; Helgi writes it'
-perhaps the tomb, macabre though it might seem, was where the locals did their courting, or perhaps the men were thinking of happier times:
Ingigerd is the most beautiful of women',
says one inscription.
Also carved here is a picture of an animal usually interpreted as a dragon, and some of the writings relate to buried treasure.. the poem Beowulf tells of a hoard guarded by a dragon in a barrow containing a secret passage, and it has been suggested that on entering Maes Howe the Vikings drew the dragon and wrote the runes because they were vividly reminded of the episode. There may, however, have been some factual element: one of the inscriptions states that the treasure was concealed north-west of the barrow, and in 1858 a cache of Viking silver ornaments was found at Sandwick, some way north from Maes Howe.
Particularly interesting is an inscription in large, even runes, informing us that these were cut,
'with the axe which belonged to Gaukr Trandilsson in the South of Iceland'.
The carver does not add his name, but, Hermann Palsson of Edinburgh University has used centuries old Icelandic poetry to establish his identity:
he was Thorhallr Asgrimsson, named in the Orkneyinga Saga as captain of the ship that brought Earl Rognvaldr Kali back from the crusade to Orkney late in 1153, and great-great-great-grandson of Asgrimr Ellitha-Grimsson, named in Njals Saga as the slayer of Gaukt Trandilsson. The axe of the victim was kept as an heirloom by the killer's family for six generations, around 200 years, and was brought to Orkney by a direct descendant of Asgrimr.
The tracing of its history is an astounding example of archaeological and scholarly detective work.
The Lore Of Scotland - A Guide To Scottish Legends
Westwood & Kingshill
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I was allowed to park at Evelick Farm, next to Evelick Castle (scene of quite a few murders). From there I headed north west to the first gate, jumped it and headed west, climbing the fairly steep slopes of Pole Hill. Easier paths can be found at the summit of the minor road.
5 well worn cup marks are on the rock which is almost between the cairn on Pole Hill and the fort at Evelick. At certain angles they can be made out, and other angles they are barely visible. They are all about 0.65cm wide.
Visited 29/12/2023.
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Several eighteenth- and nineteenth- century sources describe ceremonies performed at the Ring Of Brodgar and the Stones Of Stenness. On the first day of the New Year, young people of the neighbourhood used to meet at the Kirk of Stenness, taking enough food with them to last four or five days. Pairs of lovers would then leave the rest of the party and go to the Stones Of Stenness, known as the Temple Of The Moon, where women would pray to Odin that he would enable them to perform the promises they made to the men; after that the couples would go to the Temple Of the Sun (the Ring Of Brodgar) where the men made similar prayers. They would then go the Stone of Odin, a standing stone with a round hole in it through which the couples would clasp hands and plight their troth,
'a pledge of love which to them was as sacred as a marriage vow'.
The Archaeologia Scotica (1792) records the case of a young man who had got a girl pregnant then deserted her:
The young man was then called before the session; the elders were particularly severe. Being asked by the minister the cause of so much rigour, they answered, you do not know what a bad man this is; he has broke the promise of Odin, they put him in mind of the Stone at Stenhouse with the round hole in it; and added, that it was customary, when promises were made, for the contracting parties to join hands through this hole, and the promises made were called the promises of Odin.
It was further said that a child passed through the hole when young would never shake with palsy in old age. When visiting the stone it was customary to leave an offering of bread, cheese, a piece of cloth, or a pebble.
The Ring Of Brodgar and Stones Of Stenness can still be seen, although many of the stones have fallen and are embedded in the ground. The Stone Of Odin, however, was removed in around 1814 by a farmer, not a native of Orkney, who was annoyed by the number of visitors coming to see it. He is said to have used the stone to build a cow-house, and although no supernatural punishment is reported to have followed, two unsuccessful attempts were made by aggrieved neighbours to set fire to his property.
The Lore Of Scotland - A Guide To The Legends Of Scotland
Westwood & Kingshill
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The Cave Of Raitts, a little way off the main road near Lynchat, is a horseshoe-shaped and roofed with large slabs of stone, and is sometimes claimed to be an Old Pechts (Picts) House. The semi-subterranean low-roofed souterrains or earth-houses, probably once used for storage, are often popularly identified as having belonged to the Pechts or Picts, sometimes equated with fairies.
The structure may look low from the outside, but as its other name An Uaimh Mhor (The Great Cave) implies, it is actually quite ample, and another tradition more suitable to its size is that it was built by giants. According to Alexander MacBain, writing in 1922:
The women carried the excavated stuff in their aprons and threw it in the Spey, while the men brought the stones, large and small, on their shoulders from neighbouring hills. All was finished by morning, and the inhabitants knew not what had taken place.
The Lore Of Scotland - A Guide To Scottish Legends
Westwood & Kingshill
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A little way east of Inverness are three circular chambered cairns of an unusual type, each surrounded by a stone kerb and a ring of standing stones. While the passages of most chambered tombs in Scotland face approximately east or south-east, those at Clava face south-west towards the mid-winter sunset, an alignment which may have had symbolic significance.
Although archaeological evidence dates them back to the third millennium BCE, tradition connects the tombs with a later period. They have been said to mark the burial place of the family of the sixth-century Pictish king Brude, and Otta Swire suggests in The Highlands And Their Legends (1963) that this theory may have been inspired by the digging up of a gold rod during drainage operations near the site. She does not mention when this discovery was made, but in any case the area had pre-existing associations with King Brude, whose castle is said to have been at nearby Craig Phadrig. Brude himself was one of St. Columbas' most important converts to Christianity, and was reburied on Iona, sacred to the saint.
The Lore Of Scotland - a Guide To Scottish Legends
Westwood & Kingshill
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A short way south-west of Dundreggan, before the A997 bends and crosses the River Moriston, there is a cairn said to have been built by visiting pilgrims who added to it stone by stone. They came to honour the memory of the itinerant Presbyterian preacher Findlay Munro, who was preaching here in 1827. His text was Amos 4:12, which catalogues the punishments visited on Israel for oppression and idolatry and threatens worse to come: 'Therefore thus will I do unto thee, O Israel: and because I will do this prepare to meet they God, O Israel.' In Munro's sermon, 'Israel' could easily be understood to stand for the Episcopalians in Scotland, and behind them the English government.
Some local boys, possibly Catholics, challenged his words and called him a liar, to which he answered, 'As proof that I am telling the truth, my footprints will forever bear witness on this very ground on which I stand on.' Just as he said, on the spot where he had stood his footprints were left indelibly in the ground. It became custom for visitors to stand in the marks, and people claimed that the hair stood up on the back of your neck when you did so. Janet Ford, in Footprints in Stone (2004), reports that the prints were vandalised in the 1990s, but her latest information was that they were becoming visible again.
The Lore Of Scotland - A Guide To Scottish Legends
Westwood & Kingshill
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Some ancient forts, mostly from the Iron Age, had ramparts constructed from a double wall of stone with layers of wood and rubble sandwiched between. If the timber were set on fire as it might during an enemy attack, certain types of stone melted and fused other stones together. The great lumps of of heated, cooled, and solidified rock have patches that glitter like glass, giving rise to the term 'vitrified' forts.
Folklorists used to speculate that these were the origin of the glass castles of tradition. David MacRitchie, in 1891, wrote:
when one hears some wild story of a dreaded giant or ogre living in a castle surrounded with glass',
one knows, that such a castle could not have existed, but that the real glass castles may have been vitrified forts. He cites the example of a famous glass castle said to stand on Tor Inis or Tory Island off the north coast of Ireland, but as castles of glass often appear in fairy tales in places where no vitrified forts exist, this seems no longer a workable proposition, however tempting such a rationalisation may appear.
Craig Phadrig, a wooded hill west of Inverness, is crowned by a vitrified fort. Radio-carbon dating suggests that its ramparts were originally built in the fifth or fourth century BCE, although they may have been strengthened around 500-600CE. It has been proposed that Bridei or Brude, King Of Picts (c.555-84), lived here, as it is recorded that he had a royal palace near the River Ness. There is a King Brude Road on the way here from Inverness.
Brude was visited by St. Columba, who wanted permission to continue his work of Christian conversion, but the saint and his companions were refused entry. Then says Columba's biographer Adomnan (627-704), Columba made the sign of the cross on the great doors, knocked and laid his hands on them and immediately the bolts shot back of their own accord. Brude is supposed to have been converted by this miracle, and he and his retinue in the fort were all baptised.
A local tradition said that this baptism took place at the foot of a fir tree growing at the centre of the fort. In 1963, Otta Swire noted:
This tree was still growing, one of the finest and largest Scotch firs that I ever saw, when Craig Phadrig was sold to the Forestry Commission in the 1920's and much strong feeling was aroused by their decision to fell it as part of a clearance scheme.
The Lore Of Scotland - A Guide To Scottish Legends
Westwood and Kingshill
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Follow the same directions as Mark, and stop at the same place. The way over to the cairn was kinder to me, there was hardly any seaweed and in any case I'd had my troubles for the earlier at Ardnamonie.
Unlike the previous two sites I could get to this one and there is quite a lot to see. At 20m wide, damage by both humans and erosion has led to stones falling all around the site 13 in total, some of which might be capstones. Thanks to robbing the chamber can be seen and thanks to the robbing its difficult to tell if there are three areas / compartments. Two can be certainly seen, of the third only two stones remain standing.
One of the nicest 'what ifs' I've seen.
A great way to finish the trip.
Visited 13/08/2023
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Still doing the music, following that team and getting lost in the hills! (Some Simple Minds, Glasvegas, Athlete, George Harrison, Empire Of The Sun, Riverside, Porcupine Tree, Nazareth, The Avalanches, Public Service Broadcasting on the headphones, good boots and sticks, away I go!)
Turriff, Aberdeenshire
https://www.thedeleriumtrees.com/
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