470 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 



CHAPTER XV. 



WE landed at Hoy, on a rocky stretch of shore, composed 

 of the gray flagstones of the district. They spread out here 

 in front of the tall hills composed of the overlying sandstone, 

 in a green undulating platform, resembling a somewhat un- 

 even esplanade spread out in front of a steep rampart. With 

 the upper deposit a new style of scenery commences, unique 

 in these islands : the hills, bold and abrupt, rise from four- 

 teen to sixteen hundred feet over the sea-level ; and the val- 

 leys by which they are traversed, no mere shallow inflec- 

 tions of the general surface, like most of the other valleys of 

 Orkney, are of profound depth, precipitous, imposing, and 

 solitary. The sudden change from the soft, low, and com- 

 paratively tame, to the bold, stern, and high, serves admir- 

 ably to show how much the character of a landscape may 

 depend on the formation which composes it. A walk of 

 somewhat less than two miles brought me into the depths of 

 a brown, shaggy valley, so profoundly solitary, that it does 

 not contain a single human habitation, nor, with one inte- 

 resting exception, a single trace of the hand of man. As 

 the traveller approaches by a path somewhat elevated, in or- 

 der to avoid the peaty bogs of the bottom, along the slopes 

 of the northern side of the dell, he sees, amid the heath be- 

 low, what at first seems to be a rhomboidal piece of pave- 



