BIEDS' NESTING SEASON 157 



the island; on the other side a level sward of sea- 

 pinks would alone have paid us well for our splashed 

 jackets. But Lady Holm has a special interest of quite 

 another kind. 



The Shetland Islands seem, in the days when the 

 world was being fitted up for human habitation, to 

 have been used by Nature as an experimenting ground, 

 and raised and submerged and raised again, heated 

 and allowed to cool on no intelligible principle, scoured 

 with ice, sometimes this way, sometimes that, until, 

 as it now exists, it is hopeless for any but the most 

 specialised of specialists to pretend to understand any- 

 thing of the general geology of the group. 



But a few things seem to come out fairly clearly. 

 One of these is that once upon a time the promontory 

 of Fitful Head must have been much bigger than it 

 is now, and that, during this time, it was violently 

 cracked, and that through the crack melted rock from 

 very far below boiled up to the surface and hardened 

 there. 



Lady Holm seems to be a part of the original 

 promontory as it existed at the time of the crack, 

 which held its own when Queendale Bay was scooped 

 out. The line of the intruded rock which crosses 

 Fitful Head, if prolonged, runs through it, and accord- 

 ingly we find a little island built up, in two clearly 

 divided and nearly equal halves, of widely differing 

 rocks. The wild western side is granite, and the gentle, 

 richly-flowered eastern slopes are sandstone. 



Three or four miles from Lerwick the south road 



