The story of a fairy migration is known across Britain, and in Orkney it is told as a move across Hoy Sound. Fergusson, in Rambles in the Far North, says the trows left the Mainland and went to live near the Dwarfie Stane.
Hempie, known as the ferry-louper, is a figure in the story: a man who is said to have leaped the water between Stromness and Hoy, securing a rope between the islands, and who drowned when he tried to move with the trows across the sea. Reports of this tale differ in detail and I have only a summary of it.
The pin is an approximate point in Hoy Sound.
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