=Pierowall= is a small village on the bay of the same name, on the east side of Westray. The bay is a port of shelter for trawlers, and the village the trading centre for the island. =St Margaret’s Hope= (400) is a picturesque village situated on a bay of the same name at the northern extremity of South Ronaldshay. The bay, named from an early church dedication to St Margaret of Scotland, was known to the Norse as Ronaldsvaag, and was the rendezvous of King Hakon’s fleet in the expedition of Largs. The village is after Kirkwall and Stromness the chief trading centre in Orkney. (pp. 27, 84, 85.) =St Marys= is a fishing village situated on Holm Sound, 6 miles S.S.E. of Kirkwall. From here Montrose sailed to Scotland on his final venture in 1650. =Stromness= (1653), one of the most picturesquely situated towns in Scotland, skirts the W. and N.W. sides of a beautiful bay in the S.W. of the Mainland, which for years was the last port of call for outward bound Greenland whalers and the vessels of the Hudson’s Bay Company, and also a touching point both outwards and homewards for the ships of many Arctic expeditions. As a burgh of barony Stromness dates from 1817, but as a village it had already made history. In the early part of the eighteenth century the vessels engaged in the American rice trade having made the safe little bay the depôt for unloading their cargoes for the various ports of Britain, the growing commerce of the place attracted the jealousy of Kirkwall. The magistrates of the Orcadian capital, founding on two obscure Acts of 1690 and 1693, which appeared to confine the right to such trading to freemen inhabiting royal burghs, and to such other communities as agreed to pay cess to a royal burgh, tried to tax the trade of Stromness out of existence. The people of Stromness, after submitting to these imposts for many years, between 1743 and 1758 fought their oppressors in the Court of Session and the House of Lords, both of which tribunals decided that “there was no sufficient right in the burgh of Kirkwall to assess the village of Stromness, but that the said village should be quit therefrom, and free therefrom in all time coming.” As the case was a test one, the courage shown by this little Orcadian community freed all the villages of Scotland from the exactions of the royal burghs. Stromness was visited by Sir Walter Scott in 1814, and by Hugh Miller in 1847, the latter of whom exhumed from the neighbouring flagstones the specimen of asterolepis which he deals with in his _Footprints of the Creator_. Interesting natives or inhabitants of Stromness were John Gow, or Smith, the original of Scott’s Cleveland in _The Pirate_, a man whose true history has been told by Defoe; and George Stewart, the “Bounty” mutineer, of whom Byron writes in his poem _The Island_: