On the Beat

My journey from Unst back to Edinburgh started with a short ferry ride to Yell. I thought about visiting the hamlet of Gloup, where the drowned men came from, but instead decided to see if I could find otters. Despite looking, I hadn't seen otters on Unst. Yell has a lot of otters. When the BBC want to film otters, they go to Yell. Apparently it is otter-central for otters in Europe. (Interestingly, they were extinct in Yell and reintroduced. Though I can't remember where I read this.) So I went to a bit of the coast renowned for its otters. I went to Otter Wick. The clue is in the name.

It also had the White Lady, a figurehead from a sunken boat: she stands on the shore, looking toward the site of the wreck. She is crudely carved, painted white, and frankly spooky.

I didn't see any otters; more irritating, I bumped into a couple who told me they had seen otters on Unst the previous evening. I did see lots of seals in Yell, and had a good walk along the coast before heading to the next ferry, to Mainland.

It was cloudy on Mainland. Rather than head straight to Lerwick, where I was staying, I decided to go north. I drove right to the north, past hamlets and Nordic-looking towns, oil depots and large fjord-like voes.

I stopped and went for a walk. I walked from the east coast of Mainland to the west; from the North Sea to the Atlantic Ocean. It took me a minute or so: despite being a fair distance from the north of the island, at Mavis Grind the inlet - voe - to the east and that to the west almost meet, leaving a narrow isthmus barely wider than the road. The Vikings used to carry their long boats from one side to the other, to save the long sail north and then south around to top of Mainland. (The Scottish place name Tarbert - or Tarbet - indicates the same, which is why it is such a common place name around the coast.)

The road sign just south Mavis Grind warns of otters crossing the road. Not when I was there, there weren't.

I drove north, exploring the single track roads, going right to the north of the island, before heading back to Lerwick.

I had booked my b&b sometime before I left for Shetland, and I had been surprised how hard it had been. Most places were booked up - I think I tried six before finding a bed. Lerwick isn't a big place.

In some respects, I like Lerwick, but in others - well it is lacking somewhat. Despite all the b&bs being busy, the town felt pretty dead. I walked about, answering what to do with my evening - where to eat, where to drink. The streets were empty - this on a Saturday night. I decided on the fish and chip shop, eating in. Nowhere else grabbed me. The fish and chips were good, but I had hoped for more. None of the pubs I passed seemed very attractive either - not enough to entice me in. A couple of the bars are renowned for their music sessions, but there want a sound coming from any of them. Most of the bars were on the first floor, over shops at street level. Pushing past a gaggle of smokers deterred me.

The following evening was worse. I decided to eat at the Grand Hotel, a large place near the seafront. I went up the stairs and was directed to the bar, for bar food. The bar was an internal room, with no windows. And no atmosphere. There were two other tables, plus me: a couple at one, and three or four blokes at the other, perhaps guys off the rigs. No one was talking. The food was actually very good - I had some delicious scallops - but the place itself was awful.

I decided to go for a drink somewhere else, and settled on the Queens Hotel, on the water. The pub bit of the hotel was Obb the ground floor. I walked in. It was empty. I was the only pointer there. I walked to the bar; it had exactly the same beers as the Grand, and then I noticed the bar menu - it was owned by the same people as the Grand. The beer hadn't been great, there was no company, so I simply walked out again.

There was no one on the streets, either night. I once went to Iceland, where everybody had been making the most of the summer: it had a really busy feel, as if the locals were making up for lost time. It is possible that, like Reykjavik, Lerwick was at its liveliest late in the evening, but I saw absolutely no evidence of it. The place just seemed dead.

Mainland was fog-bound the two days I spent there, which was a pity. My first stop was Sumburgh Head, to look at the puffins. It was foggy, which shouldn't have surprised me. I saw a couple of puffins, but not the great many I had been expecting; I think I may just have been too early (which means next time I go to Shetland, it will have to be midsummer!).

There were however a lot of guillemots and fulmars.

Whilst the higher land was in cloud, at the water level it was clear. I went for a walk around Boddam Voe (where I had read on the internet there had been lots of otters recently). Several seals - their faces in the water surprisingly otter-like in the distance (though binoculars sorted them out); eider bobbing on the surface; and waders flitting along the sea edge. No otters.

I went back to Lerwick, stopping just outside the town at Clickminn. There I looked at the broch, a low (now), circular structure, moody in the mist; three thousand years old.

And then, just beyond the supermarket, I watched more seals lounging on the rocks, completely indifferent to the encroachment of commerce.

The next day - the last day - I drove across to the west coast, under and in the cloud. The museum at Scalloway was closed - it had been recommended, and I reckoned my refound affection for small community museums would have appreciated it - so I drove around some of the tiny roads and bridges connecting an archipelago of islands - Trondra, Burra, East Burra, Kettla. I went to Hamnavoe (there are several places called Hamnavoe, some pieces of water, some on land), I went to Bridge End (which, confusingly, is not at the end, but in the middle), and down to Houss (where there is a house), opposite the imposing cliffs of Clift on Mainland.

I went back to Lerwick, and had another look around the museum, and then I queued for the ferry, and sailed, overnight, back to Aberdeen.

There are two small, community museums on Unst, and I waited for the bad weather day to take advantage of them. It is two for the price of one: the same ticket gets you into both. They were both in easy walking distance for me; but it was pissing with rain, and I was buggered if I were going to get drenched again. I drove.

The boat haven is a large shed, full of boats. I wasn't certain; it didn't seem my kind of thing. I didn't think a collection of boats would be interesting.

I was completely, totally wrong. It was fascinating. Not really the boats themselves - though they were quite beautiful, some of them, crafted with great craft and love - but for the stories they told.

I may have mentioned that Unst is an island; archaeologists can trace its history back six thousand years. And it is only in the last hundred or so that roads have been important. Before that, it was boats. Or rather, the sea - and the sea made the boats important, too. People used boats for everything: it was how they lived.

At the boat haven, the history of each boat had been researched. Who built it, who bought it, who died in it - sometimes - who inherited it, who sold it. The social history of the people of Unst was told through the boats they used - to fish, to socialise, to run errands. Even after the coming of the internal combustion engine, people use their boats for food and sport: and the stories of each boat's success in the regattas were told. The boats were also rather splendid objects; all wooden, they had a lot of character - full of wear and tear, and grain.

The same names kept cropping up - the same family names, and often the same people. Sandison. Mouat. Isbister. Sinclair. These people had multiple roles: sailor, fisherman, boatbuilder. Squire. The main race in the regatta seems to have been for the Sandison Cup. And was frequently won by a Sandison, or so it seemed.

These stories were compelling.

There was also a lot about the history of the sea and Unst. Even after the Scottish takeover, Unst had strong links with Scandinavia: it was a major trading stop for merchants of the Hanseatic league, and Scots traders would come up to trade with the merchants.

Then when fishing became industrialised in the 19th century, Baltasound on Unst became one of the major herring ports in Europe, with tens of thousands of people working there during the season, travelling from all over Europe. One of the museum displays described the life of these itinerant workers. Many of the jobs were seen as women's work, allowing women to earn a living outside of service; but it sounded very hard work, gutting and filleting the fish, large quantities incredibly quickly. They used sharp, specially shaped knives and frequently cut themselves. They stayed in dorms, only socialising with men on Saturdays, when there might be dances. Sunday, the one day off, was for church.

The life of fishermen was no less alien. Before industrialisation of fishing, men would sail or row for many miles, following the shoals of herring or chasing a whale - forty or fifty miles into the Atlantic in large open boats holding several sailors. Many were lost, the boats not returning to port and their bodies never found.

It seemed a very rough life, stuck out in the north Atlantic. I could not imagine living on Unst now - let alone one hundred years ago. No electricity or gas; no roads. No vehicles. Ponies - Shetland ponies - did a lot of the work. The community museum also told a lot of stories, most of which were inconceivable.

It was another fascinating place. There was a lot about the geology; a lot about the archaeology; and a lot about crofting and fishing. It was a great place to spend a rainy afternoon.

The same names that had cropped up as boat builders, sailors, racers and fishermen were repeated here. Stories of disasters at sea and drownings; stories of families left destitute; stories of young men emigrating to New Zealand and Canada: while generations of men from specific hamlets. And men going off to war - the Shetland men were prized sailors, being press ganged into the Navy in the time of sail, and called up in the last century.

If life in the last century was unimaginable, what must it have barren life for the ancient Picts, facing the Vikings; or for the people who left the standing stones? Absolutely inconceivable, at least to me.

I loved both these museums; that seemed labours of love rather than a worthy institution. The somewhat amateurishness added to their charm - they reflected the people of the island, and I liked that.

* * *

The museum at Lerwick - on Mainland - was grander, much larger, and much more professional; but it was also a great place, and I could have spent much more time there. As it was, I went twice, because the weather was - well, foggy, and there wasn't much to see outside. It was an superbly designed building, beside the dock.

What I loved most were the displays of boats. Clearly I was now hooked. There were boats outside, moored at the dock; boats inside, hanging from the ceiling; even a boat shed, where you can watch people working on boats - the museum has a scheme to keep some of the old bodybuilders' skills alive. It was a wonderful place. And better lit than the boat haven - so I took some photos, this time.

I still hadn't seen puffins. I went to the Hermaness reserve headquarters to see if the warden could point me in the right direction. The HQ is in the former shore house for Muckle Flugga, where lighthouse keepers would stay during their off periods, and where their families lived the whole time.

The warden want there, but there is very good display, including a map showing where different birds could be seen. Puffins should be - exactly where I had been walking.

So I went back there.

I walked the longer but faster path, west to the cliffs and then north. I met a woman and we chatted briefly; she was keen to see bonxies but hadn't realised that they were the large birds all around. I passed a tall guy carrying a large tripod and a load of camera equipment.

It was a fine day, though rain was forecast. The views, same as before but in reverse, and in different light, were good. I kept my eyes open, scanning the cliffs and the sky for puffins.

I saw several as walked back until I walked back until once more I was the most northerly person in Britain, opposite the lighthouse. On the step grass slopes down to cliffs were a while troop of puffins. Not a crowd, not the hordes that I had expected but quite a few.

I spoke to many people about the lack of puffins. The consensus seems to be that it was just too early. It shouldn't have been. It should have been early but well into the breeding season, but the inclement weather in March and April seems to have kept the birds at sea. It was the same at Sumburgh, on Mainland, where I went before going back to Edinburgh - just one it two puffins. Out maybe they were all out at sea, fishing. Or maybe they were just hiding from me. There are certainly large numbers of birds around now, just as they are about to return to the sea. (The last time I was in Shetland, this time of year, one day we went back once more to watch the puffins and they had all flown away, overnight.)

Walking back to the car, it started drizzling. It had tried to rain once or twice in the afternoon as I walked north, but the rain had amounted to nothing, so I ignored it now, too. Suddenly it was bucketing down, and I was drenched, and my camera was drenched. By the time I realised how wet it and I were, it was too late; everything was wet.

When I got back to the house where I was staying, my camera had died. Completely. I took out the battery and the card, and left it to dry, hoping it would get better. It was still dead in the morning, leaving me to rely on my small, pocket camera; but by the evening it had fully recovered.

Which is nice.

There isn't a great deal to do on Unst. This didn't come as a surprise. I knew there were no restaurants (I was early in the holiday season: the two hotel restaurants opened the weekend I left), nor a pub I could get to without driving (the nearest bar to me is in the hotel which would be opening the weekend, etc).

What there was a lot of was walking. Which I did; on six out of the seven days I was there, I walked about ten miles out more. (On the other day, it rained, and I went too the two - excellent - community museums.)

Unst is an island, which means almost every walk - at least every walk I did - involves the coast. There was Hermaness, of course, its dramatic cliffs dropping precipitously; and the following day I went on another coast walk, this time on the west coast; and more cliffs.

It was another great walk; blowy, with birds. Up the coast from the ferry terminal, with Yell to the west. The coast was full of inlets, as costs are; Shetland has many deep sea lochs, as if to emphasise its Scandinavian heritage. ("Voes" in Shetland - fjords in Scandinavia...) Lots of smaller cuts in the cliffs, too - "geos".

Shags (fnaar) and terns were the predominant birds - large gathering of shags sunning their wings on the cliffs. There were a lot of shore birds as well - waders, mainly. And some terns. A seal watched lazily from the sea as a followed the line of the beach.

The walk took in several ruined buildings. Unst is full of ruins. Standing stones. Viking ruins. Medieval ruins. Abandoned crofts and cleared settlements. Ruins, and lost history, abound. (Later, in the Lerwick museum, I read of an excavation of a cleared settlement, which indicated that the inhabitants had left quickly and in a hurry - their pots and pans still over the fire, nothing packed away.) My amateur eyes could not discern one ruined settlement from another: I accepted what the guide book said were Viking ruins from Celtic ones and Christian settlements. (Ok, I could identify the standing stones...)

History lurks within the soil: you can see the boundaries between ancient fields left by generations, the trees that weren't cut down (ok not in Shetland, no trees except those planted by Victorian landowners!). The whole of Britain has been shaped by man. The history of Unst is one of change. The Vikings replaced the Picts, the Scots replaced the Vikings, and landowners replaced the crofters. The ruins on the peat moors were very dramatic and evocative.

I walked by ancient and ruined chapels, one still used as a burial ground - a strange mix of ancient and modern (albeit dead).

I walked back past Belmont House, a fine Georgian building on the machair - it looked as if it were transplanted from Edinburgh.

* * *

There are a lot of northerly places on Unst: the most northerly Post Office in Britain, the most northerly road, the most northerly house... Which I walked by. I started from Norwick beach - a very fine, broad beach of golden sand; it looked Mediterranean, but for the breeze. The track to Skaw rises from the north of the beach and climbs the cliffs (imaginatively named "The Cliffs"). The gate was locked, a notice saying the track was closed because of the danger of landslips. Instead, I just head straight up the hill to meet the road, and walked - well, north, over Swartling to Skaw.

I don't know what Swartling is, but it is marked on the map. Actually, there are many features shown on the OS map of Unst that I couldn't really work out what they were. I know I was there, but couldn't tell what the map referred to. For instance, I'm pretty sure that "Horns of Hagmark" are cliff stacks that I walked along; but "The Giant" - just south on the map of the Horns of Hagmark - what is it? I was looking for it - I mean, who wouldn't go looking for "The Giant"? But, well there wasn't anything very gigantic there. Still, I wasn't sure what I was actually looking for, so it could have been anything.

On the other hand, the map is full of great names. Like "The Horns of Hagmark".

At Skaw I said hello to the woman who was cleaning her stream (she had passed me in her LandRover and offered me a lift, and smiled when I said I wanted to walk) and walked on the beach. There is a farm at Skaw (the most northerly...), and a traditional "haa" - a hull-roofed dwelling. I climbed the cliffs to the south and followed them, undulating up and down and in and out, watching terns fish and fulmars somehow sitting in their nests on the cliff-face. And I saw a Great Northern Diver.

The path leads out to the Garths (what? What?!) and Lamba Ness, the point which is almost cut off - the track fills the width of the isthmus. The Garths and the Ness are dotted with abandoned, derelict military buildings; there is a sketch map on the road identifying their different functions. It was the site of a large RAF radar installation in World War 2 - RAF Skaw - which kept watch over the route from the North Sea into the Atlantic. (Presumably the gap between Shetland and Orkney was patrolled by the Navy.) It has an odd feeling, this huge site returned to nature.

I walked back to Norwick, getting to the road where the closed track met it; there was a guy walking up the track, so I thought I'd risk it. After a couple of hundred yards, there was a large crack in the tarmac; a bit further on, the road had slipped about a foot. I could see more cracks in the track, too, the tarmac hanging onto the edge of the Cliffs. I decided to give it a miss, returning to the road and then back down the hill, the way I had come.

I got the time of the boat wrong; fortunately arriving early, not late. I had two hours to spend in Aberdeen; I wandered around, had a coffee, had some chocolate. The centre of Aberdeen seemed badly hit by the downturn, with many shops closed out vacant; yet oil money was meant to keep the city buoyant whatever happened in the broader economy. It might be that the petrol dollars are not evenly distributed, and that the centre suffers whilst offer parts boom.

I went to the Maritime Museum, down by the docks. It is an excellent museum, though full of images of disaster. Oil paintings of wrecked vessels and drowning sailors abound; one display after another recount tales of bravery and folly at sea: while fishing fleets destroyed by a turn in the weather. Fishing families, poor at best, devastated as all the men drown. (This must be why so much of the folk music is full of despair.)

Worst of all was the detailed exhibit on the Piper Alpha disaster. Twenty five years ago, the drilling platform caught fire, killing 167 men (including some rescuers); the 61 survivors were scarred physically and mentally. (The father of a friend of mine was a psychiatrist who worked with survivors at an Aberdeen hospital - and apparently he found it traumatising enough.) It is hard to comprehend the horror. On a rig, there's nowhere to escape to. Even today, the disaster hangs over the city, which is dependent on oil.

After this litany of disaster - all of it heart-rending - I was surprised not to see an RNLI collection box anywhere. They'd have cleaned up. The museum is excellent, well put together and engaging, if a little depressing. That's life at sea, I guess.

Shetland is a long way, nearer Norway than Scotland; the Arctic Circle is nearer than Edinburgh. The ferry takes twelve hours to get there, ploughing through the rough waves and calamitous North Sea swells that caused so much of the damage described in the museum. Or, fortunately, not. On this occasion, the sea was flat as a pancake.

Aberdeen harbour is busy, full of oil support vessels and large rescue craft (in part a legacy of Piper Alpha). The quays are crammed with oil storage tanks and steel containers (everything is taken onto and off the rigs in containers). There are even ice-breakers.

The sky and the sea were the same gun metal grey. I spent a lot of time on the deck, watching the north east coast slip by until we were out of sight. The occasional splodge of bright orange set against the grey showed where the rigs were, the gas flames flowing unnaturally. (You can see the same from Edinburgh, from gas processing works in Fife, across the Forth.)

The ferry goes overnight, leaving Scotland in the evening and arriving in Shetland - Lerwick - in the morning. You can book cabins, but not wanting to share, instead I booked a "sleeping pod" - a kind of deluxe chair - largely because the idea of having to share a cabin really didn't appeal. Really bad plan! Firstly because the boat was pretty quiet, so I doubt I'd have had to share; but mostly because it was very hard to sleep in the ill-named sleeping pods.

It barely got dark. Six weeks before the solstice, the sun hardly dipped below the horizon. There was a strip of bright sky in the north throughout the night. At 2am, the darkest, the clouds have enough glow to cast a (very weak) shadow; a week later, it was possible to read outside at that time, without a torch.

There were distant lights on the horizon. Ships that pass in the night.
I was wide awake by 5am, full-Scottish breakfasted by 6, when the canteen (and bar!) opened, and on deck to watch us arrive in Lerwick at 6.30. Low cloud hung over Mainland as we passed the long spur that starts with Sumburgh and ends in Lerwick.

I first stocked up with food, as soon as the supermarket opened, and then drive north. Further north. Unst is a further two ferry rides from Mainland - Yell lies in between (home to its own fishing tragedy - 58 men drowned, 36 from the small village of Gloup). I took the back road over Yell, following the south and then east costs. I stopped at the community museum, which had some interesting displays (not least about Gloup, but also paintings and a bit about the wildlife), and had a coffee. Kind of. Nescafe, in fact, which I hadn't had for years. For reasons I don't understand, no one seemed to make real coffee on the islands. Everywhere I went, they had Nescafe. Good thing I bought ground coffee at Lerwick.

I was the only passenger on the ferry between Yell and Unst. It would be a quiet week.