One recent visitor to Hoy was on a pilgrimage to the Dwarfie Stane, she had a particular interest in visiting the stone. Miranda Kitchen wanted to see the carved name of Hugh Miller, her great great great grandfather! And she found it too. Hugh Milller’s name is beautifully and clearly carved. Several names are on the stone but this is perhaps the most famous one.

Miranda is, a far as she is aware, the only relative of Hugh Miller ever to have been to the Dwarfie Stane. I’m sure he didn’t imagine it would be his great great grand-daughter who would trace his name with her finger when he asked himself if someone might see his name many year from then and wonder who he might have been.

‘The pillow I found lettered over with the names of visitors; but the stone,—an exceedingly compact red sandstone,—had resisted the imperfect tools at the command of the traveller,—usually a nail or knife; and so there were but two of the names decipherable,—that of an “H. Ross, 1735,” and that of a ” P. FOLSTER. 1830.”  The rain still pattered heavily overhead; and with my geological chisel and hammer I did, to beguile the time, what I very rarely do,—added my name to the others, in characters which, if both they and the Dwarfie Stone get but fair play, will be distinctly legible two centuries hence.  In what state will the world then exist, or what sort of ideas will fill the head of the man who, when the rock has well-nigh yielded up its charge, will decipher the name for the last time, and inquire, mayhap, regarding the individual whom it now designates, as I did this morning, when I asked, “Who was this H. Ross, and who this P. Folster?”  I remember when it would have saddened me to think that there would in all probability be as little response in the one case as in the other; but as men rise in years they become more indifferent than in early youth to “that life which wits inherit after death,” and are content to labour on and be obscure.’

Hugh Miller, ch15, Rambles of a Geologist, 1889

Thanks to archeologist Antonia Thomas for passing on this quote. More on Mr Miller and the Dwarfie Stone here.

Images of the Dwarfie Stane from Orkney Library and Archive taken from the Talbot’s postcard collection, now part of the Hoy archive. More images here.