- seal. When conditions were hard and food was scarce, seals were a valuable source of nourishment and there are many accounts of mass slaughter of seals in former times. Sir Robert Sibbald's The Description of the islands of Orkney and Zetland (1633) explains:
Upon the west side of the bay there lye several rocks, or skerries, which selches frequent in the moneth of November, and the inhabitants neglect not to wait upon them to kill them, the skins they sell, but the bulks they salt, and in time of Lent, they eat them as sweetly as venison.
Nevertheless, perhaps because of the hauntingly human expression in a seal's eyes, a large body of legend has grown up around these mammals, some based on shape-changing powers. One of the best known is the subject of the ballad of the Selchie of Sule Skerry:
I am a man upon the land;
I am a selchie on the sea,
And when I'm far frae every strand,
My dwelling is in Sule Skerry.
As this legend tells, the selchie is not above fathering children who are then taken back to the sea.