![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustWell, two out of three's not bad:
When the call of the sunshine lured us out of Scapa Flow visitor Centre, and we had raided its café for sandwiches and buns for our picnic, we went to Lyness Naval Cemetery.
Within sight of the sea, and framed by the hills of Hoy, it's a patch of tidy green lawn where the dead lie in neat rows, sorted by service and denomination: here the Royal Navy, there the Merchant Marine, here the catholics and there the protestants, and not far away the German dead, all with their matching tombstones. Every one has its own story, but it was the single stones which caught my imagination, right over by the wall of the cemetery, two unknown sailors: "A Parsee Seaman, Mercantile Marine" and "A Musulman Seaman, Mercantile Marine". How did these two men come to be unknown?
Further along the wall was something quite different, a stone carved with an elaborate lozenge design, and the following text:
North along the main road, following the coast, another lonely grave is an odd tourist attraction, even by Orcadian standards. Accounts of Betty Corrigall's grave (the Orkneyjar web site tells the story, and has a good photograph) tend to start with the sad story of the girl abandoned by her lover, who killed herself for shame and was buried here, in the no man's land at the boundary of two parishes; the discovery of the grave by peat cutters follows.
But I read the narrative the other way round, and wonder how the story came to light. The grave is discovered in 1933 by men out cutting peat. The story, as Sigurd Towrie tells it, has poor Betty so little remembered that at first her discoverers think they may have found treasure. Yet, somehow, not only is the dead woman identified as someone who lived a century and a half earlier (in the late 1770s), but her story is pieced together in considerable detail. Of course it's possible that the story was remembered, but that's not how it's told: "There she lay, forgotten." It feels like folklore in the making (and, talking of folklore, here's video of Kerfuffle playing Betty Corrigall's Lament).
It gets odder: the rapid deterioration of the body (and the accompanying noose), the decision to bury Betty again in the same lonely spot, her rediscovery in 1941 by soldiers who gave her the name "the Lady of Hoy" and developed a macabre fascination with her, the intervention of the officers who moved the grave (although not to some more conventional burial ground) and secured it against incursions, still without marking it... I suppose in the 1930s and 1940s there still existed the taboos about unmarried pregnancy, and on suicide, which had caused this lonely burial in the first place; it still seems an odd way to treat someone identified as the heroine of a tragedy.
By 1949 it certainly seemed sufficiently wrong to Kenwood Bryant, a visiting American minister, that he placed a wooden cross on the grave, and asked Harry Berry, the Customs and Excise officer for Hoy, to provide a more permanent gravestone. Which he did, but not until 1976. (And the "stone" is made of fibreglass, because the peat bog would not bear the weight of real stone).
One last tomb, but the best of them all: the Dwarfie Stane, a huge lump of rock perched on the hillside into which two side chambers have been laboriously hollowed out by hand, without the use of metal.
When the call of the sunshine lured us out of Scapa Flow visitor Centre, and we had raided its café for sandwiches and buns for our picnic, we went to Lyness Naval Cemetery.
Within sight of the sea, and framed by the hills of Hoy, it's a patch of tidy green lawn where the dead lie in neat rows, sorted by service and denomination: here the Royal Navy, there the Merchant Marine, here the catholics and there the protestants, and not far away the German dead, all with their matching tombstones. Every one has its own story, but it was the single stones which caught my imagination, right over by the wall of the cemetery, two unknown sailors: "A Parsee Seaman, Mercantile Marine" and "A Musulman Seaman, Mercantile Marine". How did these two men come to be unknown?Further along the wall was something quite different, a stone carved with an elaborate lozenge design, and the following text:
A stone of honour
to
Zu Sing Kang
R.F.A. Tuscalusa
Who died at Scapa Flow
2nd May 1916
My witness is in heaven, my record on high. Job 16 19
Erected as a memorial of a kind act done by a Chinaman in nursing a blinded working man afterwards Senator McGregor of the Australian Commonwealth
North along the main road, following the coast, another lonely grave is an odd tourist attraction, even by Orcadian standards. Accounts of Betty Corrigall's grave (the Orkneyjar web site tells the story, and has a good photograph) tend to start with the sad story of the girl abandoned by her lover, who killed herself for shame and was buried here, in the no man's land at the boundary of two parishes; the discovery of the grave by peat cutters follows.
But I read the narrative the other way round, and wonder how the story came to light. The grave is discovered in 1933 by men out cutting peat. The story, as Sigurd Towrie tells it, has poor Betty so little remembered that at first her discoverers think they may have found treasure. Yet, somehow, not only is the dead woman identified as someone who lived a century and a half earlier (in the late 1770s), but her story is pieced together in considerable detail. Of course it's possible that the story was remembered, but that's not how it's told: "There she lay, forgotten." It feels like folklore in the making (and, talking of folklore, here's video of Kerfuffle playing Betty Corrigall's Lament).
It gets odder: the rapid deterioration of the body (and the accompanying noose), the decision to bury Betty again in the same lonely spot, her rediscovery in 1941 by soldiers who gave her the name "the Lady of Hoy" and developed a macabre fascination with her, the intervention of the officers who moved the grave (although not to some more conventional burial ground) and secured it against incursions, still without marking it... I suppose in the 1930s and 1940s there still existed the taboos about unmarried pregnancy, and on suicide, which had caused this lonely burial in the first place; it still seems an odd way to treat someone identified as the heroine of a tragedy.
By 1949 it certainly seemed sufficiently wrong to Kenwood Bryant, a visiting American minister, that he placed a wooden cross on the grave, and asked Harry Berry, the Customs and Excise officer for Hoy, to provide a more permanent gravestone. Which he did, but not until 1976. (And the "stone" is made of fibreglass, because the peat bog would not bear the weight of real stone).
One last tomb, but the best of them all: the Dwarfie Stane, a huge lump of rock perched on the hillside into which two side chambers have been laboriously hollowed out by hand, without the use of metal.
