Search engine ‘Shetland Islands, then scroll down to ‘what people ask’ and click on ‘do the Shetland Islands exist?’  It’s a fair question, for too often they are plagued by a necessity for economy, the assertion that blue sea space is wasted space.  Like lands abandoned, a prisoner in a cell, locked in a box, up in the top right hand corner of every UK national map.  That, or it’s wedged into the cleft created by the Aberdeenshire and Easter Ross coasts.  Most will know that the Shetland Islands are to the north of the Orkneys, which in turn are somewhere off the coast from John o’Groats.

But How Much Farther North?

Stand on Stromness’ pier and travel the equivalent distance of Edinburgh to Inverness and you will find the puffin burrows at the southern end of the archipelago high up on Sumburgh Head.  Now travel the virtual return trip to Perth and that will take you to the final lighthouse and a clutch of geo-superlatives, to Muckle Flugga and Britain’s ‘most northerly’ pub, bus stop, check-out, post office, petrol pump, chip shop… etcetera, etcetera.

The Other Land’s End.  Another Ultimate Thule. 

The adage that when in Lerwick: “you’re closer to Bergen than to Edinburgh” only emphasises the innate feeling that you’re in another country.  Of course it’s erroneous, yet when I’m chatting with another cycle-travelling French family and they ask as to where we’ve come from, I instinctively say “Scotland”.  So confirming my socio-typical assertion that mère, père, et trois enfants on a bike trip will invariably be French, but also that my subconscious is drifting in a foreign place.

In Another Place.

And yet that feeling of ‘new place-other world’ is only emphasised at every turn.  A place where puffins are ‘tammie norries’ and ‘curlie doddies’ are clovers.  Where the anti-littering campaigns have slogans like “dunna chuck bruck” and the chip shop doesn’t offer deep-fried pizza but serves mussels from the voe right outside and not from the pickle jar on the counter.  Where a craft IPA beer is black and the Victorian homes still have wrought iron palings.  Where honesty-boxes abound and traffic offers excessive respect.  Where trolls cross the road and there’s more wood in telegraph poles than living trees.  Where the ratio of Nordic Cross to Scot’s Saltire flags is infinite to one and the ferry’s car deck smells of fish and not diesel.

That same overnight ferry has deposited us in rush hour Lerwick, with a weather window of opportunity.  The promise of at least three days without rain, and given our locality and the capriciousness of this Scottish summer, we should be grateful.  More importantly, that ‘window’ would appear to be wind-free, or at least what passes for ‘windless’ on a group of islands that’s never more than a short walk from any shoreline and the Atlantic Ocean.  A place that’s near treeless and where the plants, ponies and panoramas all cling close to the ground. 

True, it is near wind-free, a climo-phenomenon that simply allows the cloud to settle down and clamp to the sea, that flushes out all colour leaving a pastel of greys to be the dominate colour wash, graduated shades that merge sea through shore to sky.  So it’s as well that the old croftlands and the road verges are such a dash of contrasts. Virulent splotches of magenta thyme interspersed with yellow streaks in clogged ditches of Monkey Flower and Flag Iris.  Eyebrights creep through the sheep-nibbled sward, leaving solitary sentinel Orchids, and Angelicas that are exploding like umbrellas from tissue pokes.  All are a reminder as to how a genuine wildflower meadow would once have naturally looked, pre- a drench of selective herbicides.

We’ve been south to wander through the 3500 years of habitation that is Jarlshof, not that any Norwegian Jarl ever lived in a house there.  That name comes from the ever-effervescent imagination and creator of Scots-myth, Sir Wattie Scott.  Then to traipse the sea cliffs in the company of the long-lensed twitteratzzi photographing the ever-gregarious ‘Tammie Norries’ and a wren that’s endemic to the isles.  It’s trinomial name somewhat more bulky than its minimal stature…’Troglodytes troglodytes zetlandicus’ or in the local parlance, ‘Rindill the Runt’.

In Another Place.

Now to head north on the final stretch of the National Cycle Route 1.  It, not we, started in Dover and will complete it’s travel up North Mainland; across Yell; then north through Unst to Muckle Flugga.  Where it will accumulate that collection of ‘most northerly’ superlatives, of which the most intriguing could be ‘the most northerly flowering cactus in a bus shelter’.

Bobby’s Bus Stop.

 

At the age of six he wrote to the Shetland Times bemoaning the demise of the old wooden shelter that had been deemed unsafe and demolished.  The council reacted and replaced it with a shiny new one.  A short time later a wicker table and sofa materialised, then a microwave, followed closely by a carpet, the telephone and curtains.  All anonymously.  Today the montage creations are the work of a group of volunteers, who curate a rotating celebration of themes.  Moon landings; sheep; Queen’s Jubilees; Fake (g)nus and that real, living, flowering cactus.

In Another Place.

And from gnus, fake or otherwise, it’s not an overly obvious jump to golfing.  It’s UnstFest and the organisers have created a golf course; an 18-hole peripatetic course.  You peregrinate, the holes don’t; although in this isle of low mists and wandering trolls, you wonder.  The holes might be short, but travelling between them is long, for the course encompasses the whole island.

In Another Place.

Turn a corner and the road sign warns of ‘crossing trowies’…. malevolent spectres, or a resurrection, a manifestation of a 70’s icon?

In Another Place.

Stop for a beer.  It’s IPA… India Pale Ale, a beverage that once was the lubricant for the lower orders of the British Raj; a bitter brew that traditionally couldn’t score much above an ABV 3%; hence the ‘pally-ally’ or ‘peely-wally’ appellation.  That’s all changed; now it comes with a kick, but a ‘black’ pale-ale does still seem like a contradiction, whereas the logo of a Shetland pony and the name ‘Blindside’ seems almost appropriate.  It wasn’t just the cartoonist Thelwell who considered the Shetland pony to be a self-opinionated devil incarnate.  I fully concurred with this beer bottle’s subliminal message which I took to be… “never approach a Shetland pony on its blindside: you’ll only get a hoof in a delicate place”.  That, and they don’t come with handlebars or brakes.

The actuality is somewhat more prosaic. This beer’s story refers to the visit of the NZ All-Blacks in ’17.

We’re on a tent camping trip, and whilst the Scottish countryside access code allows for wild camping, it seems churlish to avoid the established sites.  In part because they come not only with a hot shower, but with an ethos that’s been lost in much of the rest of Scotland.  Local community-run campsites operating an honesty box system.  One even has a note stating that the warden won’t be back until a week on Tuesday and that the bantam eggs are £1.40.

In Another Place.

Having taken the obligatory ‘most northerly person in Great Britain…(possibly)… photograph, visibility was somewhat reduced.  Maybe there was someone clinging to the skerries that house the Muckle Fluga light and so potentially negating our momentary claim to fame.  We turn south. 

Back along twisting roads that roll between moor and shore… repeatedly.  Hill lochs with ‘rain goose’, treacle-black waters, fishers’ bothies and respectful drivers.  The latter that are becoming a very noticeable occurrence.  A long curve lies to front, a car approaches from behind, it remains some considerable distance back…. the sight lines elongate…. still it won’t pass.  Maybe they’ve spotted one of the ultra rare red-necked phalaropes or they assume that they’re still driving a ‘single track with passing places’ road and therefore still spooked by the incongruity of such a diminished width of macadam.  Still they don’t approach, so to the gravel verge we head, still no reaction.  Finally a frantic convulsion of arm waving seems to elicit the required response.  Trouble is we are now tyre deep in peaty glaur, and more importantly, stopped…. on an up-hill.  Still, I’m not complaining for these courtesies will soon evaporate if the next ferry is due to leave in five minutes.

In Another Place.

And finally down to the metropolis that is Lerwick.  Capital of the Shetland Isles, with it’s 7000 inhabitants, cruise ship hordes, and wrought-iron railings.  It took a few moments to realise what was different, unusual, not-missing….  all the stone-built late-Victorian mansions along King Harald’s Street still retain their original garden wall railings.  By contrast, look at any comparable building’s wall head in any other British city and you’ll notice the oxy-cut rusted tooth set in a leaded hole; all that is left from the war effort to convert fence palings into aeroplanes.  Unfortunately, Spitfires were made from aluminium and not pig iron.

In Another Place. 

Stuck high up in a box or wedged into the Cromarty Firth, transferred to a different sea; and yet the islands can unashamedly call it’s diminutive town a ‘capital’ and I find it unquestionably accurate.

Is it the fact that you arrive out of the bowels of a boat or the plethora of Nordic Cross flags in places where a Scot’s Saltire Cross might fly?  Or ‘da’ dialect that’s so tantalisingly similar but so evidently different?  Or that island status, one that all islands share; with their watery perimeters, that makes them feel like places apart?  No passport control, and still it still feels like a place Not-Scotland, and yet it’s all so British, albeit with a light patina of Scandi-Norsk washed over it. 

Which leaves one unanswerable question: why has it taken me several decades to find my way to this ‘Another Place’?

Footnote: Late last year the island’s MSP Tavish Scott raised an amendment to rectify the location depiction aberration.  Now all official government publications have to be geographically correct.  The islands will sit where they’ve always sat, but now freed from that virtual prison, officially and visibly at the hub of a circle that encompasses all Scandinavia, The Faroes, Iceland and Scotland.