252 WOODS AND WILDS OF SHETLAND. [Feb., 



WOODS AND WILDS OF SHETLAND. 



jHE shortest chapter in a famous history of Ireland is headed 

 ' Snakes in Ireland,' and its contents consist of the brief 

 announcement, ' There are no snakes in Ireland.' With 

 regard to the woods of Shetland, it appears that in pre-historic 

 times there were woods, and there may be again ; Imt at the present 

 period there are none. No other part of Great Britain is so 

 completely bare of timber as the bleak hills and dreary wastes of 

 these northern cyclades. When Mr. Gladstone called at the capital 

 of Orkney the other day, in company with the last-made peer, the 

 Poet Laureate, the people of Kirkwall trembled for the safety of 

 their only tree, a little sycamore, which I remember standing in the 

 main street. During my sojourn, I visited the chief planter of the 

 Orkneys, who resides between Kirkwall and Stromness, at a spot 

 which he has planted with the best kinds of storm-defying trees. 

 He set them thick, and nursed them well, and a party of emigrant 

 rooks from Caithness crossed the Pentland Firth to inspect them, 

 with a view to nesting ; but they found the trees too small and 

 stunted for the desired object, and, after cawing on the subject, much 

 more briefly than some other parliamentary chatterers elsewhere, 

 they voted the mission a failure, and returned to Caithness. The 

 rooks of these islands are its seagulls, their rookeries are on the 

 cliffs. Gulls and plovers collect in Shetland, from all parts of 

 the country, in summer, to breed. Such birds as larks are numerous, 

 but those which are usually associated with hedge-rows and timber 

 are scarce. It may be said, ' Why not plant, and plant as Pitt did, 

 very successfully, at Walmer Castle — two for one ? ' Nil des2Jer(mclum 

 is, no doubt, a proper spirit for an improver. 



Boles of trees of considerable size have been discovered in the 

 bogs of the Shetland scatholds, and several writers have jumped to 

 the conclusion that similar trees would grow now under the same 

 circumstances. But what were the circumstances ? There is a 

 submerged forest off Cromer, in Norfolk, where the native trees of 

 England, the Yew, Oak, and Wych Elm, grew on a site now sunk 

 beneath the waves. They stand upright, in sitn, as the forest grew 

 on what was then dry land connecting om^ shores with the opposite 

 continent. A similar tract of land connected Shetland with Norway, 

 and as forests of Pine fringe the coasts of Norway, they might 

 cover the hills of Shetland now if the old conditions were restored 

 so that these rugged islands formed part of a continent having the 

 sea only on its western side. Plantations may be secured against a 

 bad aspect by means of nursing and fences : but the aspects in 

 Shetknd are all bad ; the sea is always close at hand in every 



