Lure of Nuns' Bell: Schooner Days MCLXXII (1172)

by C. H. J. Snider

Orcadian Episodes

EDAY, in the Orkneys, July, 1954.

THIS seagirt strip of rocks, sand, and a few fertile sheep farms is so remote that the meagre mail has to be rowed to the steamer that makes the round of the Orkneys from Kirkwall twice a week. The island is eleven miles long, with one country road, and few dwellings on it, and those miles apart.

This is Carrick House, the largest of them.

The figures "1633" carved in the stone of the gateway are not the street number. Here are neither streets nor numbers nor houses to need them; "1633" is the date of the completion of the mansion; before Charles I lost his head. Above the date in the stormblasted stone are armorial bearings, lions and other beasts, and a Latin motto, almost obliterated by the hail of three hundred winters.

Carrick House is a cluster of white, steep-roofed, two-storey buildings at right angles, girt by lower outbuildings and separate structures. They surround a sun-filled garden of herbs and vegetables, protected by a stout stone wall above the reach of the gnawing tidal currents of Calf Sound.

The house windows stare blankly at the stranger, for The Family is not yet in residence. The caretaker, with a neat stone cottage of his own, is busy preparing for the August re-opening. The family live most of the year nearly a thousand miles away, in the south of England.

The only other habitation in sight is the manor farmhouse at a respectful distance down the shore — if we except the gray indication of a prehistoric lochan or stone hut village on the opposite side of Calf Sound, near the Standing Stones on, the uninhabited Calf of Eday. Across the water there, oyster-crackers drop their limpie shells and terns lay their eggs, and flocks of ewes and lambs summer, happily in spite of a few morose guardian rams.

A ramble through the well kept mansion being furbished for 1954 turns the clock back more than two centuries.

From this window we see the site of the forge, where in 1725 the farm smith worked all night hammering out handcuffs and leg irons for captured pirates. Yon is the stone stable where the prisoners lay in the cold dark, like trussed fowl in a deep-freeze.

Here is the parlor where their leader was held incommunicado behind pistol-guarded doors. His despairing footfalls, as he tramped up and down, up and down through the winter night are said to be heard yet at midnight in certain Februaries. At any rate there is a large brown stain in the well scrubbed pitch pine flooring beneath the window where his blood is said to have dyed the planking. Perhaps a futile attempt at suicide. There is but one window to this upper room, and the iron clamps which held the heavy shutter bars are to be seen still in the stone wall.

The rooms of Carrick House have been kept, with excellent taste, for their original purposes — kitchen, scullery, storerooms (no, cellar underground), dining room, parlor, library, nursery, There is a gunroom crowded with horned trophies, from gazelle to rhinoceros, a sail room for yachting and fishing gear. Bedrooms have tester-covered fourposters — and modern heating equipment as well as the ancient fireplaces for peat and sea coal.

There is nothing painfully "period" or arty about the furniture under its dust covers or in the decorations on the walls. The nursery is bright and warm and full of golliwogs and left over toys of last year. The oil paintings in dining room and library are dark with age, good, whether masterpieces or otherwise. The prints and engravings are mellow. Everything shows the patina of appreciative use in all the respective centuries since the 17th.

The brown stain in the fine floor, leatherbound classics with old stle S's in the library, mouldering lions over the gateway, the former convent bell which once surmounted them, and the two short carronades with scratched broad-arrows, are not incompatible with one another.

TO REACH Carrick House one must first get to Eday and then either use the long road from the far end of the island, or come by boat up the Sound, strike the tide right, row in from the mail steamer, or slide overboard from the grounded craft that brings you on to the weed-covered rock in a "geo" or natural slipway. That is how Schooner Days landed this time, from the 30-ft. launch Balmoral, Nicholson master and owner, of Shapinsay, pronounced Sha'nsy.

Why come four thousand miles from Toronto to step on slippery seaweed?

The call of a bell.

Memory of a footnote In Scott's "Pirate" read first sixty years ago, though it said nothing of a bell.

Hearing that Carrick House had long had a bell with a strange history.

The large bell over that gateway with the mutilated lions, called Spanish nuns to vespers 400 years ago. Carried off by buccaneers in the sack of a Spanish convent, more unlikely things have happened. Certainly it became a ship's bell, and called sailors, not to prayer but to deeds of death.

The Carrick House bell came from the pirate ship Revenge, which Fea captured, virtually single-handed, in circumstances which interested Schooner Days sufficiently to make this pilgrimage from fresh water and fore-and-afters to salt Orcadian seas and pirates' lairs. As will be told next week.