SULE-SKERRY 157 



The Stack of "Stack cmd Skerry y'" or Sule-Skerry. 



Lying nearly forty miles to the west of the Orkney 

 Islands, and some thirty miles north of Sutherlandshirc, 

 are two small island rocks, known collectively to mariners 

 as Stack and Skerry, but of which the larger is, Mr. Eagle 

 Clarke tells me, termed Sule-Skerry in the Ordnance Gazetteer, 

 and the other is correctly its " Stack." The distance between 

 them is as much as four miles, and the Stack is believed to 

 cover about six acres. 



1. Donald Monro does not mention the Stack of Sule- 

 Skerry in his list of islands, and the first allusion to it, 

 which is of a somewhat vague nature, is from Sir Robert 

 Sibbakl, who, in his " History of Sheriffdoms of Fife and 

 Kinross " (1710), which contains a very good account of the 

 Gannet, speaks of there being these birds " in a desert Isle 

 belonging to Orkney." This can hardly mean anything 

 but the Stack of Sule-Skerry. 



2. The next mention of the Stack which we come across 

 is in the " British Zoology," where, among the Gannets' 

 breeding places Pennant names briefly " the stack of 

 Souliskerry near the Orkneys."* That he had the Stack 

 and not Sulisgeir, of which he makes no mention, in his 



* •' Britisii Zool.," 4th ed.. 177(i; II.. p. t)14. 



