748 
Proceedings of the Royal Society 
filled with large masses of stone which appear to have fallen from 
No. 2. No. 4 stands by itself, surrounded by deep moss, within a 
few yards of the highest point of a hill about four miles to the south 
of the other three. Its longest axis runs parallel to the face of the 
hill. It is known by the name of the “standing stone” of the 
south hill of Lunna. 
No. 3 has no special designation. 
Nos. 1 and 2 are known as “ the stones of Stofas.” “ Stofas”'is 
said to be a corruption of stay fast , and the legend accounting for the 
name is that it was given to the stones from the circumstance that 
they were originally two giants passing through Lunnaness, and 
converted into stone by some superior power who arrested their 
progress by pronouncing the words “ stay fast.” 
All the above stones look something like pale granite. 
Geo. Christie. 
The Manse , Lunna , Lerwick , , Shetland , 
18 th March 1882. 
Note by Convener. — The stones of Steffis are referred to by the late Dr. 
Ilibbert in his quarto volume on Shetland (published in 1822), p. 173, where 
also a diagram of them is given, and an intimation of his inability to say more 
about them than that they “were enormous detached masses, which do not 
seem to have undergone any very distant removal, since they repose on rocks 
of a similar kind.” In a paper in the Edinburgh Journal of Science for 1831 
(vol. iv. p. 88), written by Dr. Hibbert (as he observes) twelve years after his 
first visit, he offers an opinion, which he says he is now “disposed to pro- 
nounce with some degree of confidence.” “ These immense boulders (he says) 
are in an elevated situation upon a very narrow tongue of land, 3 or 4 miles in 
extent, which having jutted out into the ocean in a N.E. direction, would be 
opposed to the direct force of the diluvial wave. The extremity of the head- 
land being much broken, an indication is thereby afforded of the site whence 
these stones have been dislodged and by diluvial currents hurried along. The 
distance (he adds) to which they have been detached cannot be estimated at 
more than a mile or two.” 
These remarks are interesting, as indicating Hibbert’s opinion, after a second 
visit to the spot, that the “stones” had been disrupted by some tremendous 
agency moving in a direction from 1ST. E. towards S.W. and carried to a dis- 
tance of “a mile or two.” When Hibbert wrote in the year 1831, he not 
unnaturally, for boulder transport, adopted the theory proposed by Sir James 
Hall of Dunglass in 1812, of oceanic waves sweeping across continents. It was 
not till many years after, that ice was suggested as a medium of transport. 
Hibbert, after referring to these stones of Steffis as “immense boulders,” 
“ detached ” and “hurried along ” from the headland of Lunna, goes on (by way 
of confirming his opinion) to cite several other cases in the Shetlands of the 
transport of boulders, which are extremely interesting. 
