It is therefore clear that the Danes, or rather the Norwegians and Danes, have scarcely a right to claim many of the numberless monuments in the Lowlands which both the learned and unlearned ascribe to them. In fact, the whole eastern coast of Scotland, from the Cheviot Hills to Moray Firth, is entirely destitute of characteristic and undoubted Scandinavian monuments. It must, however, be remembered, that the actual Scandinavian immigrations into the Lowlands certainly took place after the Norman conquest of England; or, at all events, at so late a period that the Northmen could not remould the Scotch names of places into Scandinavian forms. Nor is it strange that the Scandinavian colonists in the Lowlands, who at the close of the eleventh century had long been Christians, and influenced by the civilization prevailing in England, should neither have erected such monuments as stone circles, bauta stones, cairns, and barrows, which presuppose a state of heathenism among a people, nor have impressed their characteristics generally on that district by means of peculiar memorials. For at that time they played a subordinate part there, and afterwards gradually became very much mixed with Celts, Anglo-Saxons, and subsequently even with Normans. The very circumstance, however, that so large a tract of land as the Scottish Lowlands lay out of the path of the Scandinavian conquerors during the ninth, tenth, and first half of the eleventh centuries, was the cause not only that the Danes were able to direct all their power with more effect against England, but also that the Norwegians could more easily subdue the Orkneys and the Shetland Isles, the Hebrides, and various tracts in the northern and western Highlands. In these districts much more perceptible traces of the Norwegian settlers, and of the results which they produced, are still preserved, than in the Lowlands of the in general transient devastations of the Danes and Norwegians. ---------- SECTION V. The Orkneys and Shetland Isles—Natural Features.—Population.—Oppression.