Guano and Golden Eagles By JOHN BETJEMAN W ITHOUT a drop
of Scotch (does one say `butterscottish' or 'double scottish'?) blood in my veins I take up my pen. The National Trust for Scotland, under the chairmanship of the vigorous and far-seeing Lord Wemyss and the able secretary Mr. Stormonth Darling and his staff, is a unique institution. Unlike its English counterpart it not only owns and conserves land and buildings but also acts as a preservation force in the many Scottish burghs and counties which have no local amenity society. Scotland's popula- tion is small enough for her National Trust to arrange co-operation between industrialists and government departments in preserving the attrac- tions of an area. This year it tried an experimental tour of islands, including Fair Isle and St. Kilda, two of its properties. A Norwegian motor ship, the Meteor, belonging to the Bergen Line and with Captain Knut Maurer in command was chartered.
So with 150 passengers, most of them bird- watching lairds and their wives, we sailed from Leith on April 26 while the Norwegian orchestra played 'Loch Lomond' and the hills of Fife and East Lothian slid by and goat cheese, smoked salmon and a hundred Scandinavian dishes made us forget we might ever be sick. We climbed the Bass Rock which stinks of guano and is alive with earwigs later in the year. I was surprised to find how large was its ancient sandstone fortress and when crawling into a dungeon there I put my hand on a centipede.
On Sunday we landed at Kirkwall, where the older houses with stepped gables stand sideways on to narrow streets which are all pavement. Above the grey houses rises the huge red cruci- form cathedral of St. Magnus, which came as a wonderful surprise. I had no idea that twelfth- century Romanesque could look so unlike the style as seen in France, Germany, England or Scotland. This was brought about by the slimness and height of its vaulted cruciform interior, all of red sandstone with occasional lighter coloured bands. It is a Norwegian building, for the Orkneys were not ceded to Scotland until 1486. The Presbyterian woodwork and glass of the•present century are clearly the work of a sensitive architect.
Why go to Mycence when the walk we took through a tunnel in a green mound in Orkney led ' us to the tomb chamber of Meshowe? This room, walled and vaulted with huge flat stones converging towards the roof, is twelve feet high. Its date is said to be about 1500 tic as are the ten stone huts with their beds and hearths and cup- boards of stone in the excavated village of Skara Brae on the edge of a sandy seashore. Orkney with its circles and mounds was, it seems, a cul-de- sac of the Stone Age people on their journey from the Mediterranean. For geographical reasons they did not proceed to Scotland.
I wondered what the sixty or so simple, flaxen- haired people of Fair Isle, who are mostly called Stout or Wilson, thought of our luxurious vessel when they visited it. They must live a hard life in that windy, treeless place, knitting through the winter and unable to open the doors of the plain Victorian kirk and chapel on a stormy sabbath. The north of the island is moor and high cliffs, the south is milder with green fields and crofts where the agricultural instruments are of wood. Seals play at the base of the rocks and sea birds wail above and the Fair Isle wren sung us a welcome.
A gale brought the Atlantic and the North Sea clashing into mountains of water as we crossed from Fair Isle to St. Kilda, passing the lonely out- line of Rona with its ruined church, and the holy and mysterious Flannan Isles. In sunset light, with even the best sailors pale, we saw the tremendous Cliffs and stacs of the St. Kilda group rising at some points 1,300 feet sheer above the ocean. We anchored, calm at last, in Village Bay and when We landed found ourselves in Oxford Street. The RAF is building on the top of one of the three mountains of Hirta, the main island, a radar station for Duncan Sandys. The ruined crescent of the village, evacuated in 1930, looks pathetically down at huts and tents and lorries. The noise of lorries and the fumes of petrol spread over the deep semi-circle below the mountains. Kenneth Williamson took some of us to the medkeval vil- lage of dry-stone hovels above the deserted crescent and simple graveyard and on through the mist to the quieter side of the island, where are the remains of a matriarchal settlement as yet uninvestigated by the archeologist. Sailing round the island in royal blue water we saw guillemots huddled on unapproachable ledges, shags, shearwaters and cheerful puffins which looked like red-nosed waiters. We heard the St. Kilda wren sing, and off Stac Lee one surface was a white sheet of gannets. When Seton Gordon, a Prince among men, played superbly on the pipes ' the 'Farewell to St. Kilda' that evening across the moonlit water as the RAF party sailed back to camp, what Celtic gloom was there, my country- men! What sadness, not just for the deserted island, but for the RAF men stranded on it with only the primitive brown sheep like goats, and the mice for pets, with the wireless on in their creamed-out Nissen hut of a mess, with irregular letters from home, irregular supplies and those piles of unopened fortnight-old newspapers look- ing so trivial in the damp, forbidding grandeur of the island!
We returned to sunlit emerald waters of the Western Isles, where variegated rocks which seem as highly coloured as the background of Holman Hunt's scapegoat went gliding past us. We landed on almost forbidden Rhum and saw the golden eagle fly above an Edwardian castle. On sacred Iona we picked green pebbles at West Bay and knelt in the rugged pink cathedral. Stone Age, Picts, Norsemen, Celts, RAF men, birds, rocks, seals and sheep—all these sights and countries in six days. Why go to the hot south when the warm north has so much history and colour?
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