The Trowie Knowes of Mainland

Trowie Knowes, West Mainland Orkney, Scotland

Low grassy mounds where the Orkney trows — squat, hidden, half-buried folk — gather and dance on Hogmanay. Those who join are gone for seven years.

Trowie Knowes — also called fairy-knolls, hill-tombs, or simply knowes — are scattered across the Orkney West Mainland in the area between Stenness, Birsay and the Loch of Harray. Many of them are confirmed Neolithic chambered cairns; many more are smaller mounds of uncertain origin and have never been excavated. To Orcadians until well into the twentieth century they were home to the trows. The trow is Orkney's hidden folk — distinct from the trolls of Shetland and from the mainland Sìth — small, squat, often described as half-buried in the earth even when standing, dressed in grey. They were nocturnal, possessive of their hills, and capable of taking the unwary. They were also said to dance. The Hogmanay dance is the best-known piece of trowie folklore. On the night of 31 December — the most liminal night of the Orkney year — the trows of the West Mainland were said to come out of their knowes and dance on the turf above. A boy or girl who joined the dance would not return for seven years, and would come back unaged and unable to speak in human language for another year after that. The tradition is recorded in Orkney material from at least the 1820s and the cases attached to it are very specific. A girl in 1864 was missing seven years to the night and walked back into her father's croft. A boy in 1907 disappeared at Hogmanay from a farm at Sandwick and was retrieved, again seven years to the night, from beside the Stones of Stenness. He was alive, healthy, and could not speak Orcadian for a year. Several other cases are local family knowledge rather than print. The trows are not seen as often as they were. The knowes are still there.