Walter Scott

The Pirate Walter Scott

Man, however, had in former days considered this as a remote or unlikely event; for aNorwegian chief of other times, or, as other accounts said, and as the name of Jarlshof seemed toimply, an ancient Earl of the Orkneys had selected this neck of land as the place for establishing amansion-house. It has been long entirely deserted, and the vestiges only can be discerned withdifficulty; for the loose sand, borne on the tempestuous gales of those stormy regions, hasoverblown, and almost buried, the ruins of the buildings; but in the end of the seventeenth century, a part of the Earl's mansion was still entire and habitable. It was a rude building of rough stone, withnothing about it to gratify the eye, or to excite the imagination; a large old-fashioned narrow house, with a very steep roof, covered with flags composed of grey sandstone, would perhaps convey thebest idea of the place to a modern reader. The windows were few, very small in size, and distributedup and down the building with utter contempt of regularity. Against the main structure had rested, in former times, certain smaller co-partments of the mansion-house, containing offices, orsubordinate apartments, necessary for the accommodation of the Earl's retainers and menials. Butthese had become ruinous; and the rafters had been taken down for fire-wood, or for otherpurposes; the walls had given way in many places; and, to complete the devastation, the sand hadalready drifted amongst the ruins, and filled up what had been once the chambers they contained, tothe depth of two or three fe