Birds' -Nesting Season. / I 



only on birds' nests. On the smaller of the two are 

 still to be seen the traces of a little chapel, probably, 

 like many others in sites as lonely and picturesque, 

 first built as a retiring place by some long-forgotten 

 Culdee who has left behind him the only record of a 

 saintly life in the name " Cross Holm " which the 

 rock still bears. The beauty of the larger " Lady 

 Holm," on the west side a heap of huge bare 

 boulders, tossed up by the Atlantic rollers, which in 

 winter gales half sweep 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 anything 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 



