Arise again, Sir Walter

 There is a characteristically fine report by Charlotte Higgins in The Guardian this morning about the debt the English owe to Sir Walter Scott, the novelist who for many years of the Romantic age was the biggest selling author by far, possibly the biggest selling author of all time in comparison with his peers, but who is now, she rightly says, almost wholly unread.

The piece caught my eye because, until my holiday trip to the Orkney and Shetland in the past two weeks, I too was a member (though not a proud one) of the 'hadn't read any Scott since a long ago attempt on Rob Roy'  school. After touring Britain's northern isles with his 1821 Waverley novel, The Pirate, in my hand, I now recognise how much pleasure there is still to be had.

The Pirate is a great island tale. No traveller here should be without it although, as Higgin's piece suggests, it might be advisable to take a library copy with you and not to rely on buying one in the bookshops full of TV-tie in otter books.

 I knew I was going to enjoy it when Chapter Five began: "We can only hope that the gentle reader has not found the latter part of the last chapter extremely tedious". Scott's picture in Chapter Four of a subsidiary character called Triptolemus Yellowley, the mainland 'improver' with a doomed mission to reform island ways of agriculture in the late seventeenth century with careful reference to the Italian lore of Virgil and Columella, had been so magificent that, with this winning addition of authorial modesty too, I was enslaved to The Pirate for the whole holiday.

Almost very tourist destination has a few pages - from St Magnus's Cathedral in Kirkwall to the ruins of Jarlshof near Sunborough and the Stennis Stones. Jarlshof (pictured above)  is an extraordinary site where visitors can see houses occupied by humans in various different ages from the neolithic, 5000 years ago, through the iron and bronze ages, Picts, Vikings and terrorising, Norse-beating Scottish lairds. But its name is the one given to it in the opening pages of The Pirate where it serves as the dwelling of the mysterious recluse whose identity is not revealed until the end.

If there is another such site in the world, of such archaelogical importance, that gets its name today from its borrowing by a nineteenth century novelist, I should like to know of it. Meanwhile, as though to greet me back to the day-to-day TLS, there is a new Oxford Classical Text of Columella, the agriculturist of the first century AD whose advice on planting and ploughing would have been so useful, Triptolemus Yellowley thought, for the uselessly independent, bloody-minded, stubbornly Nordic peasantry.

This new edition, it is said, has been 'freshly constituted, upon the 'solid recension of pioneering Swedish scholars'. If Triptopolemus had been able to claim that virtue to the pro-Scandinavian, anti-English-and-Scottish farmers of his time, he might perhaps have fared better than he did.