Part 20

The most famous battle in these parts is, however, related to have taken place on the northern shore of the mouth of the Firth of Tay. In the reign of Malcolm the Second, after the Danes had already made themselves masters of England, the attacks of the Vikings began to assume a more dangerous character. A number of them landed in the Bay of Lunan, in Forfarshire, whence they plundered and laid waste the country for many miles around. But to the east of Dundee, near Barry, they encountered a Scotch army, which defeated them, and compelled them to make a retreat, during which they were again repeatedly beaten. Even to the present day tradition points out a line of Danish monuments extending from Barry to Aberlemno, in the neighbourhood of which place the last battles were fought, and where human bones of a remarkable size are said to have been often found in the tumuli. At Camuston, not far from Barry, stands a stone cross called “Camus Cross,” on which are carved various kneeling figures in an attitude of prayer. According to the statements of the common people the cross was erected in memory of the Danish general Camus, who fell at this spot. At Kirkbuddo were formerly seen the remains of a Danish camp called “_Norway dikes_.” In the parish of Inverkeilor, and near the farm called “Denmark,” traces of Danish ramparts are also to be found; and at Aberlemno, Murphy, and many other places, are seen sculptured monuments, said to have been erected in commemoration of the before-mentioned fortunate victories over the Danes.

It is of course by no means incredible that a great battle may have been fought between the Scots and the Scandinavian Vikings in this district, and at about the time mentioned. But it is perfectly clear that most of the Danish monuments before noticed have no connection whatever with this frequently-mentioned battle. The name _Camus_ is not at all a Scandinavian one; and it is, besides, not only certain that the village of Camuston was, in more ancient times, called “Cambestowne,” but also that there are several similar names of places in the Lowlands, which are most correctly derived from the old Celtic language. The sculptured monuments in question have not, in fact, the least appearance of having been erected after any battle. In a splendid work lately published (P. Chalmers, “The Ancient Sculptured Monuments of the County of Angus,” Edinburgh, 1848, folio), are to be found correct delineations of a number of stones of the same kind, which are spread over Perthshire, Forfarshire, Kincardineshire, and Aberdeenshire; and still more are to be met with along the coasts of the northern Lowlands and north-eastern Highlands. One, near St. Vigean, in Forfarshire, has an ancient Celtic inscription; but, with this exception, no inscriptions are found upon them. They are usually ornamented on one side with a cross and various fantastic scrolls and ornaments, and on the other with biblical representations, such as Adam and Eve at the tree of knowledge, Daniel in the lion’s den, Samson with the jawbone of an ass, &c. Sometimes all sorts of strange figures are found on them, such as crescents, sceptres, mirrors, combs, and other articles; as well as serpents, lions, elephants, horses, dogs, stags, elks, sphinxes, &c. On some stones we find representations of the chase, with huntsmen, hornblowers, stags, and hounds. The carving is for the most part executed with much skill, and the whole style of the work seems referrible to the tenth or eleventh century. It is beyond all doubt that these stones cannot be ascribed to the Danish or Norwegian settlers, though several authors have asserted the contrary. They are evidently Christian-Scotch monuments, and have been erected with a very different aim from that ascribed to them: some, probably, as boundary stones of landed possessions and hunting-grounds; others as monumental stones to deceased persons.

One of the Aberlemno stones—a rare exception to the rest—which stands close by the church, represents on one side a battle, in which both foot and horse are engaged, and in which a bird attacks a man wearing a helmet, who tries in vain to cover himself with his shield. (See the annexed woodcut.) Above is seen a mirror, and one of those inexplicable figures which appear so frequently on stones of this kind. But in this there is the peculiarity, that the figure intersected by the cross-bar with the sceptres (?) at each end, is square, whilst in other instances it is generally in the form of a crescent. On the back of the stone is carved a cross covered with the finest scrolls and ornaments, and surrounded by fantastic figures of animals interlaced together. The height of the stone is about six feet. This monument might possibly have been erected after a victory; but it still remains uncertain, whether after a victory over the Danes. At all events, the stone is Scotch, and not Scandinavian.

The case is much the same with most of the so-called “Danish” forts, camps, stone circles, and bauta stones; which are in general of Pictish or Celtic origin. Had they really been erected by the Danes and Norwegians, those nations must evidently have held confirmed dominion in these parts for a length of time; but it is well known that, in the early period in which these monuments were raised, they can be regarded as masters, in the south and central Lowlands, only at very short and far-distant intervals.

North of the Grampian Hills, and particularly in the district of Moray (the “Mærhæfi” of the Sagas), the Norwegians and the Danes, it is true, firmly established themselves for a somewhat longer period of time. In the beginning of the eleventh century, for instance, they defeated the Scots in a great battle near Kinloss, took the towns of Elgin and Nairn, whose garrisons they put to the sword, and afterwards settled themselves on the sea coast. But the kingdoms which they founded were speedily destroyed without leaving any remarkable traces behind them; so that, even in this district, we cannot place implicit reliance upon the many different stories about the Danish monuments. According to a common and not improbable tradition, the district of Moray, and the present Aberdeenshire, were the theatres on which the last battles between the Danish Vikings and the Scots were fought. Thus it is said that, in the reign of Malcolm the Second, the Danes, after the battle of Kinloss, suffered a great defeat at Mortlach in Banffshire, where Malcolm, as a thank-offering to God, caused a convent to be built. This, again, was partly the cause of Mortlach’s becoming the seat of a bishop. Popular tradition states that the Scottish leader vowed during the battle to add to the church in Mortlach as much as the length of his spear if he succeeded in driving away the Danes. An ancient sculptured stone near the church is mentioned as pointing out the Danish leader’s grave; and the skulls of three Danish chiefs are still shown, built into the north wall of the church, as a perpetual memorial. A similar tradition is preserved about the church of Gamrie, also in Banffshire. The Earl of Buchan vowed, in the heat of the battle, to build a church to St. John, to replace that which the Danes had destroyed, if he gained the victory over them. Three of the sacrilegious Danish chiefs, by whose command the church had been desecrated, were found upon the field of battle, and in a description of the church lately published we read as follows:—“I have seen their skulls grinning horrid and hollow in the wall where they had been fixed, inside the church, directly east of the pulpit, and where they have remained in their prison house 800 years!”

It is further stated that, on account of the repeated defeats which the Danes and Norwegians had suffered in the Scotch Lowlands, King Svend Tvskjæg sent, in the year 1012, his son Canute, who afterwards became king of England, with a large fleet and army to the northern part of the Lowlands. Canute landed on the coast of Buchan (Aberdeenshire), near the Castle of Slaines, in the parish of Cruden (or Crudane). Here a very fierce battle was fought, which can scarcely have been favourable to the Danes, since a treaty was afterwards concluded between them and the Scotch, according to which the Danes were to evacuate the fortress called “Burghead,” in Moray, then occupied by them, as well as the rest of their possessions in the kingdom of Scotland. According to the same treaty the field of battle was to be consecrated by a bishop as a burial-place for the Danes who had fallen on it, and a chapel was to be built there in which masses should be continually sung for their souls. In this neighbourhood also there was certainly, at one time, a chapel dedicated to the Norwegian saint, Olave; but the ruins of this chapel, as well as the old churchyard, have since been destroyed by quicksands. The wind, however, by blowing away the sand, still brings, at times, the fragile bones of the Danes to the light of day.

Straight out of the town of Forres, in Nairnshire, stands a stone nearly twenty feet high, on one side of which is seen a large and handsome cross, and under it some indistinct human figures. On the other side is carved a number of horsemen and people on foot, evidently representing an execution on a great scale; several bodies are seen, and by the side of them the dissevered heads. The sculpture is executed with the greatest care, and displays some very tasteful ornaments, which, however, are now partly effaced through the action of time on the soft stone. The pillar is commonly called “Svenós stone,” and tradition relates that it was erected to commemorate the treaty of peace concluded between Svend Tveskjæg and King Malcolm, and the expulsion of the Danes from the coasts of Moray. But the sculptures at present existing on the stone do not in the slightest degree represent anything of the kind. The stone belongs to the same class of monuments as the sculptured Scotch stones before described, which are so numerous in the Lowlands, and in the north-eastern Highlands, particularly Inverness-shire, Ross-shire, and Cromartyshire.

One of the few places in the Lowlands, which may with reason be assumed to have preserved considerable traces of the Danish expeditions, lies in the neighbourhood of the towns of Forres and Elgin. It is a promontory which projects in a north-western direction almost a mile into the sea. Towards its head its steep craggy shores are from eighty to a hundred feet high. This extreme point, which incloses a small harbour, and which presents a level surface on its top, where the fishing village of “Burghead” is situated, was formerly separated from the main land by three immense parallel ramparts, fifteen to twenty feet high, with cross ramparts lying between, as well as deep and broad ditches, of which there are still considerable remains. That the Romans had a fortress here (said to have been named “Ultima Ptoroton”) was clearly proved several years ago, when a Roman well, which is still used, was discovered cut in the rock. But for Vikings, like the Norwegians and Danes, this place afforded a still better refuge than for the Romans. Towards the land side, which is in some degree barren and uninhabited, they could easily defend themselves; and from the sea, the Scots could attack them only by entering the harbour, where the well-equipped vessels of the Northmen of course prevented their landing. In all probability, therefore, the Norwegians and Danes still further fortified this important point, and gave it, perhaps, its present name. Tradition, at least, relates that the Danes, after taking Nairn, isolated the town or fortress, and called it “Borgen” (the castle); in which account it is very probable that the names of Nairn and the neighbouring Burghead have been confounded. The latter place gradually gained such importance that it was the last stronghold the Danes possessed in the Lowlands.

It is therefore clear that the Danes, or rather the Norwegians and Danes, have scarcely a right to claim many of the numberless monuments in the Lowlands which both the learned and unlearned ascribe to them. In fact, the whole eastern coast of Scotland, from the Cheviot Hills to Moray Firth, is entirely destitute of characteristic and undoubted Scandinavian monuments. It must, however, be remembered, that the actual Scandinavian immigrations into the Lowlands certainly took place after the Norman conquest of England; or, at all events, at so late a period that the Northmen could not remould the Scotch names of places into Scandinavian forms. Nor is it strange that the Scandinavian colonists in the Lowlands, who at the close of the eleventh century had long been Christians, and influenced by the civilization prevailing in England, should neither have erected such monuments as stone circles, bauta stones, cairns, and barrows, which presuppose a state of heathenism among a people, nor have impressed their characteristics generally on that district by means of peculiar memorials. For at that time they played a subordinate part there, and afterwards gradually became very much mixed with Celts, Anglo-Saxons, and subsequently even with Normans.

The very circumstance, however, that so large a tract of land as the Scottish Lowlands lay out of the path of the Scandinavian conquerors during the ninth, tenth, and first half of the eleventh centuries, was the cause not only that the Danes were able to direct all their power with more effect against England, but also that the Norwegians could more easily subdue the Orkneys and the Shetland Isles, the Hebrides, and various tracts in the northern and western Highlands. In these districts much more perceptible traces of the Norwegian settlers, and of the results which they produced, are still preserved, than in the Lowlands of the in general transient devastations of the Danes and Norwegians.

SECTION V.

The Orkneys and Shetland Isles—Natural Features.—Population.—Oppression.

We might expect that the most northern isles of Scotland, which lie exposed in a stormy sea, should possess the same wild and mountainous character as the Faroe Isles and Iceland. Such a belief gains strength when, for the first time, in passing from Scotland, we obtain a view of the southern Orkneys, especially the considerable mountain heights of the Isle of Hay. Indeed Hay obtained its name (originally “Haey,” or the high island) from the old Northmen, on account of the mountains which distinguish it from the rest of the Orkneys; for on sailing farther northwards, past Hay and the adjacent South Ronaldshay (formerly “Rögnvaldsey”), we soon discover that the Orkneys are in general flat and sandy, although with cliff-bound coasts. Their heath-covered hills scarce deserve the name of mountains, though here and there called by the inhabitants “fjolds,” or Fjelde (mountain rocks). The islands are destitute of wood, and exhibit frequent ling moors and desert tracts of heath. But there is also much, and by no means unfertile, cornland to be found; and an improved system of agriculture has made such advances, that the stranger is sometimes surprised, in these distant isles, by the sight of luxuriant fields of wheat.

The waves of the sea, and the powerful currents, have intersected the Orkneys with innumerable winding bays, or sounds. Besides Mainland, the chief island (first called by the Norwegians “Hrossey,” and afterwards “Meginland,” or the continent), the archipelago includes a great number of islands of different sizes, which spread themselves in a north-east direction from the north coast of Scotland. The farthest of the Orkneys is Fairhill, or Fair Isle (formerly “Friðarey”). It lies almost midway between the Orkneys and the Shetland Islands, in the midst of the rapid current now called Sumburg Roost, but which the Norwegians in former times called Dynröst (from “röst,” a maelstrom, or whirlpool); whence, again, the most southern promontory of the Shetland Islands has obtained the name of Dunrossness (Dynrasternes). The Shetland archipelago (the old Northern “Hjaltland,” “Hjatland,” or “Hetland”), like that of the Orkneys, forms a long-extended line, but differs from it in consisting principally of one large island, Mainland (“Meginland”), surrounded by a great number of proportionately small and insignificant ones.

The most southern point of Dunrossness, on Mainland, forms the promontory of Sumburg Head (“Sunnbœjar-höfði”), which, however, is of no very great height; indeed the highest mountain in Shetland is only about fifteen hundred feet above the sea. Although the Shetland Islands, with regard to mountains, are not to be compared with the Faroe Isles, still they exhibit a sort of transition from the flatter Orkneys to the mountainous character of the Faroe group. Before the coasts of Shetland stand many high and ragged rocks, called “stacks” (old Norsk, “stackr”). The coasts themselves are steeper, and the mountains larger than in the Orkneys. On the other hand, however, the valleys are both longer and broader than the mountain valleys of the Faroe Islands. Heath and moorland abound, whilst the corn-fields are small, and the corn harvest in general very uncertain and difficult to gather. Fishing is the most important source of profit for the inhabitants.

The Orkneys and the Shetland Isles were, as is well known, completely colonized by Norwegians in the ninth and tenth centuries. They were, however, known and inhabited much earlier. It is possible that the Shetland Islands were the “ultima Thule” spoken of by Roman authors in the first centuries after Christ; but it is certain that the Romans at that time knew the Orkneys by the name of “Orcades:” whence it appears that the primitive root _Ork_, in the later Norwegian name of the islands, is very ancient, and probably of Celtic origin. Before the arrival of the Norwegians, both the Orkneys and the Shetland Islands seem to have been inhabited by the same Pictish or Celtic race that was settled in the rest of Scotland. Of these older inhabitants memorials still exist in different kinds of antiquities of stone and bronze that are dug out of the earth, as well as in numerous ruins of castles, or Pictish towers, originally built of flag-stones laid together, without any cement of loam or mortar. There are also cairns and stone circles; the most prominent amongst which are the “Stones of Stennis,” on each side of Brogar Bridge, in Orkney. They are, like Stonehenge and Abury circle in England, surrounded with ditches and ramparts of earth; and, after Stonehenge, must be regarded as amongst the largest stone circles in the British Islands. The immense masses of erect stones are remarkable evidences both of the strength and of the religious enthusiasm of the old Celtic inhabitants; and it is no wonder that they made in ancient times such an impression on the Norwegians, on their arrival at these islands, as to induce them to call the promontory on which the largest circle stands “Steinsnes” (Stones-naze) and the adjoining firth, “Steinsnesfjördr” (Stones-naze Firth, now Loch of Stennis).

No sooner had the Scandinavian Vikings settled themselves, in the ninth century, securely in these islands, than they became a central point for the Northmen’s expeditions not only to the British Islands, but also to Iceland and Greenland. Thus when Floke Vilgerdesön, or “Ravnefloke,” went on a voyage of discovery from Norway to Iceland, he landed on Hjaltland, or Shetland, in a bay which obtained from him the name of “Flokavágr.” This bay must probably be sought on the east coast of Mainland, about Cat Firth (Kattarfjörðr); for in its neighbourhood lay the Loch of Girlsta (originally “Geirhildarstaðir”), which is said to have obtained its name from the circumstance of Floke’s daughter, Geirhilde, having been drowned in it during her father’s short visit to the country. By degrees the islands became the rendezvous of a great number of discontented Norwegian emigrants, who, to avoid the new order of things, had withdrawn themselves from their old paternal home, and from this distant place of refuge continually harassed the coasts of Norway.

This induced King Harald Haarfager to undertake an expedition against the Orkneys and the Shetland Isles, as well as against the Hebrides, on the west coast of Scotland; all of which he succeeded in subjugating. He gave the Orkneys and the Shetland Isles, as an earldom under the crown of Norway, to Ragnvald Möre-Jarl’s family. This family produced some great men, who extended their dominion over large tracts in the adjacent kingdom of Scotland. The islands continued, however, to be the resort of many malcontent and fugitive Norwegians. The renowned Ganger-Rolf, the founder of the royal Norman house, is said to have dwelt a long time on them before he undertook his expedition against Normandy. When King Erik Blodöxe, Harald Haarfager’s son, was driven with his queen, the atrocious Gunhilde, from Norway, he fled to Orkney, whence he carried devastation far and wide. Subsequently he obtained a kingdom in Northumberland; but, after his fall, his sons again sought the Orkneys; where they remained till they succeeded in obtaining the kingly power in Norway. Snorre Sturlesön states, that after the fall of this dominion, Gunhilde again fled to Orkney, where her daughter, Ragnhilde, had married a member of the Earl’s family. Ragnhilde trod entirely in her mother’s footsteps by occasioning dissension, and even murder, in the family of the Earl. Somewhat later the Orkneys were visited for a time by Kalf Arnesön, so well known in the more ancient history of Norway, who, at the battle of Stiklestad in 1030, was one of the chief leaders of the peasant army against King Olaf, the saint. He came to the Orkneys just in time to take part in a severely-contested naval battle, fought in the year 1046, near Rödebjerg (Rauðabjörg) in Pentland Firth, between the Jarls Thorfin and Ragnvald Brusesön. Kalf supported Thorfin with six long ships, and thus decided the victory in his favour.