[Illustration: Ring of Stennis and Cromlech, from the northward.] The smaller circle, called the “Ring of Stennis,” is more clearly monumental than the Ring of Brogar, as it contains the remains of a cromlech within it. It seems to have consisted originally of twelve stones placed round the circumference of a circle of about 100 feet in diameter, and surrounded by a deep and broad trench with a circumscribing mound, now nearly obliterated. Only two stones of the circle remain standing, and a third lies prostrate. Peterkin states that some were thrown down and removed by the tenant of the adjoining lands in 1814. The cromlech is also thrown down, but one of the supports of the massive capstone is still standing, and the capstone, which lies beside it, is 9 feet long by 6 feet broad. [Illustration: Ring of Stennis, from the westward.] The Ring of Bookan is a circular space 136 feet in diameter, surrounded by a trench 44 feet broad and 6 feet deep. There are upwards of twenty tumuli, some of them very large, in the immediate vicinity. In the Saga of Olaf, Tryggvi’s son, Stennis is mentioned as the place where Havard, eldest of the five sons of Earl Thorfinn Hausakliuf, was slain in battle with his sister’s son Einar. The Saga says:[203]—“Havard was then at Stæinsnes in Hrossey. There it was they met, and there was a hard battle, and it was not long till the Earl fell. The place is now called Havard’s _teigr_.” Teigr is an individual’s share, or allotment, of the tun or town-land, and the expression might be taken to mean rather that Havard was buried by simple inhumation than that there was a cairn or tumulus raised over him, in which case it would have been known as Havard’s How. But the name of Havard was never connected with the great tumulus known as Maeshow, and if he was buried in a tumulus at all, it is more likely that his corpse was burnt with the customary ceremonies of that heathen time and his ashes placed in a great stone urn. The grave-mounds of the Viking period in Norway prove this to have been then the common practice. Such a mound, enclosing such an urn, was opened at Stennis by Mr. Farrer, M.P., in 1853. This tumulus, if not Havard’s, was apparently Norse, and being the largest in the neighbourhood of Stennis, must have been that of a person of great distinction. The fact that the Norsemen at this early period (about A.D. 970) called this place Steins-ness, shows that it was known to them, only as it is to us, as the ness of the monumental stones. If they had had anything to do with the erection of any of these monuments, in all probability we should have had some incidental record of the fact in one or other of the Sagas. XII. MOUSA AND THE PICTISH TOWERS.