The trows of Orkney love music and tend to draw fiddlers to their mounds, which they call knowes. In this Deerness tale the fiddler is Tam Bichan, and the mound is Dingieshowe.
As a summary of the story puts it, he met a trow with a grey beard who asked him to play. His sense of time was distorted. Muir's version of 1998 is said to derive from The Orcadian newspaper of 1943.
The tale is the Orkney form of the old story of the person who spends a night or years under a hill and comes out to find the world has moved on. I have only a brief summary of the plot and no longer text.
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