Unst Sunday

Sunday was a nice day for January in Shetland in that it is not raining. We decided to hike to Muckle Flugga today and had decided to try to do this way back when we planned the trip. It all depended on the weather.

We left around 10 and met up with Delano and Davy who showed us the house where the lighthouse keepers lived when the Muckle Flugga lighthouse was manned. Today it is automatic as are all of the many lighthouses around the coast of the UK.

There were six families, each with their own accommodation who lived in the housing complex and Davy and Delano stayed in one of them and showed us the house. It was remarkably spacious.

There were two teams of three keepers who rotated. We debated how long the stints were, and I believe that because the lighthouse was close the stints were shorter like maybe 7 days at a stretch. All was dependent on the weather and the ability to get on and off the rock.

The other incredible thing was how they ever built the lighthouse in the first place. It is stuck on the top of a rock, maybe a hundred and fifty feet up. Davy said they built a sort of funicular railway to winch (manually) supplies up to the top to build the lighthouse.

The hike was across a combination of peat bog, and being a National Park there was a walkway that kept you off the peat and helped keep your feet dry. This worked for about half of the hike, and after that there were a series of posts in the ground that showed the general direction. I would not have liked to do the hike in poor visibility as the posts were about 100 yards apart, and lets say that they blended with the landscape very successfully as they were difficult to see.

It was about 1.5 hours out to the end of the peninsular by the coastal route and it was only in the very last part that we got a view of “The Flugga”. We came back by the (slightly) more direct route in an hour or so. It was cold and windy but the exercise kept us warm. Again I was grateful for the hat that Jen made for me.
The last picture is of the Saxa Vore Early Warning Radar Station that I mentioned in an earlier post. It is across the Spound from Muckle Flugga and now is a remote station but used to be a manned RAF facility until the early 2000s