In the north of Scotland, between the Orkney Islands and the northern coast of Caithness and Sutherland, lies the Pentland Firth, and in the full strength of the tide it runs like a river. A massive head of water builds up in the North Sea on the one side or the Atlantic on the other, and the water pouring through the narrow channel of the Firth eddies and surges as it copes with varied coastal and seabed conditions. An online guide for small sailing craft, VisitMyHarbour, carries a strong warning.
With smooth water and a commanding breeze, the firth is divested of its dangers, but when a swell is opposed to the tidal stream, a sea is raised which can scarcely be imagined by those who have never experienced it; and, if, at the same time, the wind is light and with the stream, a sailing vessel becomes unmanageable.”
The Caithness Landscapes describes features like the Wells of Swona and the Merry Men of Mey. When the current hits the island of Stroma it leaves a whirlpool in its wake, out off the northernmost point, just by the lighthouse. It’s called the Swelkie, or Swilkie, with its name coming from the Old Norse svelgr (“swallower”).
It is the most dangerous whirlpool in the Pentland Firth,” records the Northern Lighthouse Board, “which is caused by the meeting of four or five contrary tides.”
The lighthouse was built in 1896 by two of the great Stevenson family of lighthouse engineers, brothers David Alan and Charles, with a lantern lit by petroleum spirit. Later came a paraffin lamp, and in 1972 conversion to electricity.
By that time the last family had left, ten years before, and you might think that Stroma today would have an air of sadness about it, with its cottages abandoned and going into ruin, and the feeling of the end of an old song. Not at all – step on the pier and walk up the grassy road and there you are at the highest point of the island with a panoramic view of the Firth and the ships moving by and you feel in the middle of everything, amidst the coming and going on the sea and the view to the horizon.
Skills of island life
The Stroma folk of old had every skill needed for island life. A fascinating book, Lest We Forget: The Parish of Canisbay, edited by Anne L. Houston and published in 1996 to support the maintenance of the beautiful Canisbay Parish Church, has a chapter on Stroma that is rich in memories. We hear how the people built their own houses and liked to fit them out well, and how they built farm buildings, and machinery for milling and threshing. When wireless sets arrived, powered by battery accumulators, one man designed and built a wind turbine to charge up to six at a time. There were skilled builders of boats for fishing and for transporting cattle and horses, and boats were built for orders elsewhere.
They could handle boats in the most difficult conditions, and when the Finnish ship Gertrud ran aground in 1934, the Stroma boat Evelyn took off all 22 of the crew. They could carry out salvage work too, sometimes on the scale of cutting into the side of a wrecked Grimsby trawler to remove the boiler and engine for a tug to take south. The island’s skills extended to making whisky, and the great hole of the Gloup was an ideal place to hide a still, with a cave at the bottom that was only revealed at ebb tide. They tended the still by night when needed, and sometimes it would be a young woman who climbed down the cliff face with just a lantern in the darkness.
The pilots of the Pentland Firth
There was so much shipping passing by. In Lest We Forget Sutherland Manson writes of pre-war days, of groups of trawlers from Grimsby and Hull and Aberdeen, a long dark cloud of smoke hanging above them on a calm summer evening; herring drifters, with the English boats recognisable by a slender radio mast; cargo ships with timber on their decks, and an occasional three-masted barque; and then in wartime the sight of destroyers escorting battleships and aircraft carriers.
Through the long age of sail, Stroma men were much in demand as pilots for ships through the Firth. Each new commission could be a challenge. In 1891 the Norwegian schooner Drammen, bound for the Isle of Man with a cargo of flooring boards, arranged for David Banks to take her all the way to Stornoway. Ten miles west of Cape Wrath they were hit by a hurricane which carried away her top gallant mast, her bulwarks and all her deck cargo, and a boat as well. They tried for Shetland but were caught in a gale which took her topsails, and when they eventually made land it was at Vestmannahavn in the Faroe Islands. A 35-mile walk over the hills took him to the east side of the island and the Faroese capital, Torshavn, and a mail steamer bound for Granton in the Forth – and then a train ticket north to Wick, courtesy of the Shipwrecked Mariners’ Society.
His brother Donald, rightly called the Bard of Stroma, wrote in 1948 an account of the work of the pilots that vividly draws the reader in to the scene. Here we are, on the deck of a sailing ship, with the Stroma pilot in command, directing the crew.
Steersman is she gripping on the wheel? – (Is she sailing as close to the wind direction as possible?) That is what I want her to do, not to run off the helm. That is the thing for being good in the stays. With tide we never wish the ship to be sailed too close to the wind. Now tighten your braces (haul on the tackle to adjust the yards and sails to the wind direction) and your sheets for close sailing. We are to have a fair day yet, and the tide is good.”
The turning mill
And when you stand today by the lighthouse buildings and look out at the great turning water of the Swelkie you can see the kind of danger that needed so much skill and care to avoid. The Norse seafarers spoke of it as a great mill, turned by two giant women. The Icelandic scholar Snorri Sturluson, born in 1179, wrote of a king called Frodhi who once ruled all the Norse-speaking lands in a golden age of peace. From Denmark he was given two quernstones – “so big that no one could move them”. And, says Snorri, “it was a feature of the quernstones that they would grind out whatever the grinder told them to. This quern was called Grotti.”
In Sweden Frodhi found people able to turn the mill – two giant slave-women, Fenja and Menja. He ordered them to grind out gold, and they did. But he drove them too hard.
He gave them no more rest or sleep than a cuckoo is silent or it takes to sing a song. It is said that they sang the lay called ‘The Song of Grotti’. And before the quern stopped they ground out an army against Frodhi, so that at night there came a sea-king called Mysing, who slew Frodhi and took great booty there.”
The sea-king took the quern and the two women – and he ordered them to grind salt, and they set to it and the salt built up.
At midnight they asked if Mysing was not tired of salt. He ordered them to carry on milling. They milled for a little while until the ship sank. There was afterwards a whirlpool in the ocean where the sea fell into the eye of the quernstone: then the sea became salt.”
The women long remembered
Two versions of Snorri’s manuscript say that Mysing’s ship sank in the Pentland Firth.
There has been a whirlpool there ever since, where the sea falls into the eye of Grotti. Then the sea grates as the mill grates, and then the sea became salty.”
And quite remarkably, the story was also in local memory. In 1895 the Faroese scholar Dr Jakob Jakobsen came across it in Shetland. In Dunrossness he met a man from Fair Isle, whose parents – or possibly grandparents – had come from Orkney; and one of their stories told of two witches – “Grotti Finnie and Grotti Minnie” – said to grind salt in the quern of the Pentland Firth.
In 1909 he made his first visit to Orkney and heard it at first hand. A young Orkney student, Hugh Marwick, newly graduated that year, had been inspired by his work on Shetland language and lore and wanted to follow up in Orkney; and Marwick would go on to become renowned for his work on language and placenames. When Jakobsen was in North Ronaldsay, he met a South Ronaldsay woman who told him about the mill in the sea.
That same year, the story reached another keen scholar, Alfred W. Johnston. Born in Orphir House, he had spent much of his working life in the south but took every opportunity to come back to Orkney to study history and tradition. He published much material in a journal, the Old-Lore Miscellany, which he edited along with his wife.
Alfred Johnston says that he was “told by Mrs Sinclair (Mary Leslie) of Greenigoe, Orphir, a native of Fair Isle, that Grotti Finnie and Luckie Minnie were well known as the names of two witches who were frequently invoked to frighten naughty children”.
These various local mentions of the two women are quite special. It’s true that the salt-grinding mill was known in Norway and it’s featured in one of the classic folktales gathered in the 19th century by two great friends, Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe – but the mill they heard about is a simple domestic hand-quern bought by a poor peasant and later sold to a sailor – and not the great mill of Snorri’s story. So apart from Snorri’s writing, observed the Danish folklorist Axel Olrik, “Outside of the Orkneys neither Mysing or his salt mill are known to tradition.”
To see more of the island of Stroma, we have a link to a film below. And for a look deeper into the origin of the story of the mill in the sea and the interpretation that has developed, you can go on to another article in this magazine – Hamlet’s Mill.
