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About 50
yards from the main Hoy Road, near the Water of Hoy, there is a solitary
grave. It is the loneliest, and yet,
possibly the most visited one in Orkney. This is the burial site of
Betty Corrigall,
a young woman who died in the late 1700s. The story behind her isolated
resting
place is tied up in the religious practices and customs of the late 18th
century.
Betty
Corrigall lived at
Greengairs Cottage, near Rysa. Aged 27,
she discovered she was pregnant when her boyfriend was at the whaling
and was
so ashamed she tried to commit suicide.
The first
time she tried to
drown herself by walking into the sea, but was spotted and stopped. Betty hanged herself in the barn later. In
those days, church law stated that those who took their own life could
not be
buried in consecrated ground such as a graveyard. Subsequently, neither
the
Laird of Hoy nor of Melsetter would let her be interred on their
estates. This
meant that she had to be buried on unconsecrated ground – the parish
border between
Hoy and North Walls – with the boundary line halving the coffin. So it was that there came to be a coffin
buried in a peat bank with only a stick to mark its existence.
That
was, until May of 1936
or ’37 when some members of a family called Robb, from the croft of
Quoys, were
digging on the peat bank and came across the corner of a wooden box.
Thinking
that it could contain treasure, but not sure what to do with it, the
Robbs
contacted the late Issac Moar, Hoy’s postmaster, who phoned the police
for
advice. They said to open it. Taking the spade to the corner of the
box, the
diggers revealed a pair of feet. Then
they brought up the whole of the coffin and discovered that it
contained the
body of a young woman. Surprisingly, she was not a skeleton as the peat
had
preserved the body. The woman’s dark
hair was long and her skin, which was tinged brown with the peat, was
drawn in
and wrinkled. The piece of rope which had been the noose lay beside the
body,
but turned to dust when exposed to the air. The Robbs reburied the
coffin, not
knowing it would be dug up again a few years later.
At
the beginning of 1941, a
small group of soldiers were digging on the peat banks in order to put
up
telegraph poles when they came across what they called “the Lady of
Hoy.” Mr
Charles Ward of Coventry was one of the group and he explained to
“The
Orcadian” that the body’s dark hair was matted and fell past her
shoulders.
Astonished, the soldiers quickly covered over the grave again.
Sadly, it
seems that since
then throughout the war, every new troop of soldiers would go out to
dig up the
grave and view the body. This exposure
to the air made the remains deteriorate rapidly.
Fortunately,
when Officers
came to hear of this they put an end to it by moving the grave 50 yards
and
placing a heavy concrete slab on top of the coffin.
In
the late ‘40s, Mr Harry
Berry of Hoy was approached by and American minister, Kenwood Bryant,
who asked if he would
erect a headstone for the grave. He
visited the grave, and saddened to see only a stick marking the spot,
he had
put up a small wooden cross and a fence. Mr Berry told him that he was very busy, but would do
so when
he found time. When he retired 27 years later, Mr Berry remembered his promise and surveyed the
grave. Deciding that a stone marker would
only sink
in to the bog, he made a lightweight hollow fibreglass headstone and
this was
put in place.
So one
evening as the sun was
going down, the late Issac Moar, a Mr Isbister and Mr Berry gathered around the new “stone” to hold a
short
service for Betty Corrigall as it was thought unlikely that she would
have had
a proper service when buried.
Now
every year many tourists
stop their cars and cross the peat bank to look at the solitary grave,
intrigued as to why it should be there, and one Londoner, Nat Gould
wrote a
small book “Hoy Song – the poems of Betty Corrigall” after visiting the
scene.
But
Betty may not be the only
unfortunate to be buried in the peat banks of Hoy.
A brief historical document supports the local legend
that there is also the grave of
a minister - David Bremner - who hanged himself on North Walls and may
have been buried on one of the small islands in the Water of Hoy.
Ironically, his father may have been party to the earlier decision to
bury Betty on the parish boundary separating Walls from Hoy.
Based
on articles which appeared in The Orcadian and independent research
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