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Harry nodded, and after a careful inspection of the rougue, remarked, "I think we shall find something here; but we must not come to grief in a ruin, as Garth Halsen did when he dug into the old Broch." They went to work with a will, and soon removed the cairn and laid bare what was evidently the entrance to a vault of some sort.
There was a good deal of whispering between Yaspard and the Manse boys before they parted; and there was a very significant "Good-bye," from the Yarl of Broch. He had kept our Viking-boy very much with him throughout the day, and had quite enchanted him by suggesting a scheme which contained the germ of much exciting adventure, although there was no enemy to meet or circumvent.
The circular court, which was formed inside, varied from 20 to 36 feet in diameter, and was not roofed over; and the galleries and stairs were lighted only by slits, all looking into the court, in which, being without a roof, fires could be lit. In some few there were wells, but water-supply, save when the broch was in a loch, must have been a difficulty in most cases during a prolonged siege.
It could not be battered down or set on fire, and if an enemy got inside it, he would find himself in a sort of trap surrounded by the defenders of the broch, and a mark for their missiles. The broch, too, was quite distinct from the lofty, narrow ecclesiastical round tower, of which examples still are found in Ireland, and in Scotland at Brechin and Abernethy.
The rest of that day was spent at Broch delightfully spent, we know, since the Yarl was host. Gerta and Amy were extremely kind to the boys, although they were only the "young ones," and not to be compared with their elder brothers. But Yaspard was more attracted to Garth than to the girls. He had been abroad with Mr.
"If Yaspard were here," said Harry, "he would wish to stay by his boat until he had made her fit to float us off the Stack again. I don't half like leaving her all by herself, poor old Osprey." "You and your Viking can return and finish up your voyage of discovery another time," quoth Garth; "but at present you must submit to being taken to Broch in a commonplace manner."
In a note to Ivanhoe, and in his Northern tour of 1814, Scott describes a stone causeway to a broch on an artificial island in Loch Cleik-him-in, near Lerwick. Now this loch, says Scott, was, at the time when the broch was inhabited, open to the flow of tide water. Let us suppose that the circular wall of the stone superstructure slanted inwards, as is not unusual.
The man was faint from hunger and wandering, and benumbed with cold, and a deep sleep fell upon him. When he lay down beside the green hill where Deirdre was, a troubled dream came to the man, and he thought that he enjoyed the warmth of a fairy broch, the fairies being inside playing music.
It is more likely that the wreckers' den was a place dug out of the earth by themselves." "That was a common dodge long ago," quoth Yaspard; and Tom added, "We got a good illustration of that sort of thing in the old Broch of Burra Isle." "And you are thinking, Harry," Yaspard exclaimed, "that this cairn may cover some portion of the den perhaps be the entrance to it?"
Moreover, the appearance of an unique and previously unheard-of set of inscribed stones, in a site of the usual broch and crannog period, is not invariably ascribed to forgery, even by the most orthodox archaeologists. Thus Sir Francis Terry found unheard-of things, not to mention "a number of thin flat circular discs of various sizes" in his Caithness brochs.
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