A trip to Shetland. 60 degrees North! The beginning

I am in Shetland as I write this and try to catch up on my blogging.

It is Thursday morning around 6am and all is quiet as I got up while the others are still sleeping. I begins to get light here around 3.30am and we were out for a walk at 10pm last night and it was in a prolonged dusk that finally turned to dark around 11.30. There is still a month to go to the summer solstice so I can see that it will be almost light 24 hours a day. Of course that also means that in December it is dark almost all day!

I arrived in England last week and the plan is to visit Shetland, which is about 80 miles off the north coast of Scotland. I was here at the beginning of my RTW trip last year and it is among the early posts on this blog. The weather is somewhat different now!
I am here with my sister Mags (who will be 70 shortly, but shows no signs of it!) and my recently retired brother Steve and his partner Alison. She is a doctor here in Shetland.
I went to Mags home south of London when I arrived and we started out from there a couple of days later.

The evening I arrived Mags and I visited a friend of hers, Peter who had driven his Land Rover all the way from London to Capetown South Africa last year. He is a Ranger in a Nature Preserve (about 150 acres) about 20 miles out of London. They have had some deliberately set fires that burned about 20 acres of natural heather that will take many years to recover. Anyway he was on fire watch for the evening, but we had a chance to chat and learn about the park and his work.

Friday was a more relaxed day and we spent the evening with Piers, Marion, and their 15 month old daughter Erin. She (Erin) is lovely of course and is crawling and will walk if you hold her hand, but is still a bit wobbly and has no inclination to walk on her own at this point. Her dad did not walk until he was 17 months but then got up and ran almost immediately!

Mags and I left on Saturday by train to go up to Newcastle, about 200 miles north of London where Steve and Alison were staying. They had just arrived back from a week in the southwest of France in the foothills of the Pyrenees. I have details on the place they stayed in and they said it was just fabulous.

The train journey was really good and fast (about 3 hours from London) and a good chance to see some of the English countryside.

On Sunday Steve and I went to his house in Scremerston, which is about 60 miles north of Newcastle, and near Berwick on Tweed, which is the border with Scotland. He has multiple projects going on there with the house and it is a major renovation and changing around of the living space. Some is landscaping and some of the work is inside creating a woodworking shop.

Steve's project house. Ongoing for the last 10 years or so.

Dry stone wall and raised flower beds will add to the privacy

In the afternoon we walked along the coast to the train station (and of course got caught in a rainstorm about half way) and caught the train back to Newcastle.

One of Alison’s daughters Emily was in a choral performance that evening in a large concert hall called the Sage. Let’s just say that it was not my sort of music, but Steve thanked me for coming and “showing solidarity!!” so he knew that it was not for me. They enjoyed it and Emily had fun performing.

Berwick on Tweed. A beautiful border town.

Another train ride on Monday bought us to Aberdeen by lunchtime and we met up with Eileen Cruickshank my Facebook friend and her lovely 5-year-old Sam. He is energetic and full of mischief but a lovely little boy who behaved most of the time.

We ate lunch and took a walk along the seashore and then met her husband and daughter Kristy before heading to the overnight ferry.
This is a serious ferry at about 110 m length and carries trucks, buses and passenger vehicles as well as 600 people. It runs nightly to Orkney (3 times a week)  and Shetland daily

The ferry ride is about 12 hours overnight so Steve had booked cabins. Mags and I shared one and Steve and Alison the other. We had an early night after a very good dinner in the “fancy” dining room on the ferry. Nice Shetland lamb chops for me!

Aberdeen is a major port that supports the oil and gas drilling in the North Sea and there are huge support ships and supplies in the harbor. It is a prosperous town that has been unaffected by the economic turbulence of the last few years

We got to our destination Lerwick on time on Tuesday morning and had developed a plan from there. Steve and Alison went to her place and then back to catch the ferry to Out Skerries. It was another 2 ½ hours on that ferry (much more basic) for them and they then settled in to the rental house they had booked (more on that later)

Mags and I had booked a rental car to pick up at the ferry and our plan was to head north to the islands of Yell and Unst. This involves a 45-minute drive to the Yell ferry at Toft and about a 20-minute ferry ride over toYell. You pay for the Toft ferry, but all the others are free after that, mostly because that is the only way on and off the islands beyond there!

Mags had never been to Shetland, so it was all new to her and I had just crossed Yell on my first (and only other) trip. There are almost no trees and the soil of poor peat-land so even the sheep are scarce.

A view across some of the better farmland

Alison is getting ready to join the medical practice at Mid Yell after working in Lerwick for 2 years, as an associate doctor joining the husband and wife team who have had the practice for the last 13 years or so. The previous associate Naomi is taking over on Unst just to the north and where she lives.

Anyway Alison is provided with a house on Yell as a part of the job so we had somewhere to stay and our first job was to find the house and get the key. We were successful at that.

Way back when Mags was a teenager she had completed a 6-month course at the Agricultural College near Aberdeen, and had completed the class with several Shetland girls. They had not met again since then, which was over 50 years ago. Through a variety of coincidences and a little research Mags had located two of these ladies and had made plans to meet them. Yell has only about 600 residents but they are spread far and wide over the island. It turns out that Mary (one of the ladies) owns the shop in Aywick, one of the multiple small communities and is literally just around the corner from where Alison’s house is located.

Mags and Mary outside the Aywick Shop on Yell. Reunion after more than 50 years

We had expected a small store but this place was a massive emporium with everything available from fresh local bread to buckets of organic chicken manure, gasoline, diesel and kids clothing. She employs 7 people some part time and some family.

Sponsored walks are a worldwide phenomena. Note the subtext at the bottom, the age of the participants and the distance. Tough people!

This chicken is ready for the cold weather with his full length pants!

Just like Habitat. Always looking for donations!

Inside the store

We spent about an hour looking around and chatting and then headed up to Unst, again with a 10-minute ferry crossing. We had to wait for the ferry and there was a very basic looking café by the ferry terminal called “The Wind Dog Café”. We had a bowl of their soup of the day that was a spicy (very) Thai chicken and vegetable soup. Excellent and just what we needed.

Ferry terminal

After the ferry ride we headed up Unst to see the “Unst Bus stop” which is decorated by local supporters and has become known around the world. The current theme (it changes a couple of times a year) is the Tall Ships Race that will be calling at Lerwick in July for about a week.

The original bus shelter was blown down in a gale several years ago and a school age child wrote to the authorities asking for a replacement. The locals then decided to decorate it as a means of saying thank you when the new one was built! A neat story.

We then headed up to the very north of Unst to see the shore station for the Muckle Flugga lighthouse. We had thought that we might have time to hike out to see the light but you really need about 4 hours to make the trip. It was also very windy so we decided to hike part of the way on the Hermaness Peninsular. There were lots of other people doing the same thing, more than I would have thought.

Around 4.30 we headed back down towards the ferry and our second meeting with Mags friends from all those years ago.

Mags and Mairie after our delicious dinner in her home.

From my previous trips and various conversations, Alison had sent me a book written by a Shetlander, Lawrence Tullock about his experiences as an associate light keeper in Scotland in the ‘60s and early ‘70s. He is a Yell man and mentioned in the book that he had to go to Out Skerries for work and only knew one person there, Mairie Mann, who was the District Nurse.  She married Tom Anderson, a Skerries man. Mags read the book after me (as a primer for the Shetland trip) and worked out very quickly that it was the same person! She had talked with her by phone and now we were on our way to meet her and her family!

I have discovered that Shetland is a very tight network of intertwined families and that is more concentrated once you get out on to the islands. It is a wonderfully supportive community and well intentioned, but I think that you would have to grow up in this atmosphere to truly accept it. Neighbors and family are absolutely there for you, but equally you have no personal privacy. To contact Mairie my sister had talked with a lady on Out Skerries with the same name, and she said that it was not she, but she knew who Mags was looking for!

When we arrived at Mairie and Tom’s home we found that it was just up from the café where we had eaten the soup and close to the Gutcher ferry terminal. We were well received and spent a few hours and some wonderful Shetland food trying to catch up with what had happened over the past 50 years or so.

Mairie’s husband Tom had worked as a fisherman and told stories about fishing and visits to Norway. He had a dry sense of humor and was a very interesting man who was able to give us a good insight in to Out Skerries where we were to reunite with Steve and Alison the next day.

We left around 8.30 and headed to Alison’s house in Aywick for the night.

We ran out of time to see what we wanted to see the previous day and so had to backtrack to see the Gloup village Fisherman Memorial. It was off on a side road about 5 miles and commemorated the deaths at sea in July 1891 of 58 sailors and fishermen in a very violent storm.

Gloup Fisherman Memorial

To put that in perspective that was 58 men out of a total population of maybe 1000 people on Yell and a significant portion of the breadwinners. They would go out to sea to fish in 16 ft (about 5m) open rowing boats, probably without any sort of life vests or other safety equipment except a rope or two. The monument listed the names, what boats they were on and the community they were from. It was a very simple memorial erected in 1991, just one hundred years after the tragedy. It is hard to begin to imagine the huge impact on the whole community.

Single lane roads with passing places are the norm on Shetland

On the road back to the main road we saw a lady (a teacher we think) with about 6 kids out for a walk or a field trip. The local primary school was just up the road, and this was probably all the kids from the school!

Lunch stop back on Mainland. Fantastic scenery.

I will do a separate blog piece on schools, and the government structure including health care.

Back on the main road it was about 30 minutes back to the big ferry that took us to the mainland. After a brief stop to drop our bigger bags we headed to Tingwall airport to catch the flight to Out Skerries.