It is quite certain that the oath to Woden or Odin was sworn by persons joining their hands through the hole in this ring stone, and that an oath so taken, although by Christians, was deemed solemn and binding. This ceremony was held so very sacred in those times, that the person who dared to break the engagement made there was accounted infamous and excluded from society.[294] Principal Gordon, in his 'Journey to the Orkney Islands' in 1781, relates the following anecdote:--"The young man was called before the session, and the elders were particularly severe. Being asked by the minister the cause of so much severity, they answered, 'You do not know what a bad man this is; he has broken the promise of Odin,' and further explained that the contracting parties had joined hands through the hole in the stone."[295] Such a dedication of a stone to Woden seems impossible after their conversion of the Northmen to Christianity about the year 1000, and most improbable if the monument was of Celtic origin, and existed before the conquest of the country 123 years earlier. If the Northmen had not hated and despised their predecessors they would never have exterminated them; but while engaged in this work is it likely they would have adopted one of their monuments as especially sacred, and followed up one of their customs, supposing this to have been one, though there is absolutely no proof in a holed stone being used in any Celtic cemetery for any such purpose? The only solution seems to be that the monument, with this accompaniment, was erected between the conquest of the country and the conversion of the conquerors, and, like many ancient rites, remained unchanged through ages, not as adopted from the conquered races, but because their forefathers had practised it from time immemorial in their native land. On any other hypothesis it seems impossible that so purely Pagan a rite could have survived through eight centuries of Christianity, and still be considered sacred by those whose ancestors had worshipped Wodin in the old times many centuries before these stones were erected in the islands.