Animals and random observations

Apparently there are lots of otters in Shetland. Otter spotting locations are even marked on tourist maps. We went to quite a few of these.

We saw no otters but plenty of seals popped their heads up to look at us.

This one is an Arctic Bearded seal, an unusual visitor, who decided to rest all week on a boat ramp in the middle of Lerwick.

The inter-island ferries look like whales with open mouths spewing out vehicles onto the wharf, and then swallowing up more cars.

 There are sheep on the beach.

 And a fish on this hill. Look carefully, it is outlined in the heather. No one knows how it got there.

Shetland is mostly bare hills covered in heather, grass and peat.

Trees are so rare that these ones on a farm are marked on the tourist map. 

There are a lot of Shetland ponies in Shetland. After all, this is where they originated. They are no longer used as pack horses or work in coal mines and can only be ridden by small children, but they are still bred here. 

 The little piebald decided to come over to say hello.

This beautiful boy was my favourite. He was on an open hillside above a sandy beach with a flock of ewes and lambs, no other ponies. When he saw me he marched purposefully straight up to me.

I didn't have any treats to feed him but he seemed to enjoy having his ears rubbed and his photo taken.

We arrived in Shetland by 12 hour overnight ferry, a ship half the size of Tassie's Spirit ferries. We had a very smooth sailing but sometimes the North Sea sailing is so rough they actually have the chairs chained to the floor so they don't fly around. We paid a bit extra for sleeping pods thinking we would be able to lie down flat to get some sleep. We got no sleep, as they just recline more than airplane seats and were so uncomfortable. They should be called anti-sleeping pods. Today we are taking a one hour flight to the city of Aberdeen.

The past lives in the present

History. As we watched teenaged school students swarming up and around the 2,000 year old broch, we thought about how lucky they are to be able to see and touch over 2,200 years of their own history. We Australians, who have no indigenous ancestry, have never been able to do that in the land of our birth. We can only go back 230 years if we are lucky enough to be descended from someone on the First Fleet. It is one of the reasons we come here to Britain, to the Country of our ancestors - to see our history.

Mousa Broch, the best preserved Iron Age building in Europe is on Mousa Island and dates back to 100 BC-100 AD. We had to take a small ferry to see it.

It has one doorway to the interior, numerous small rooms inside the walls opening on to a central space with the fire in the middle. We climbed narrow stone stairs that curve upwards inside the wall to access the walkway that encircles the very top of the walls and would have made an excellent lookout point. The broch is both a home and a fort.

Clickimin Broch is in the town of Lerwick, across the road from the supermarket, behind a pony paddock.  

It might have looked like this when people lived here.

This is a replica of a broch beside a current archaeological dig that is revealing a village of wheelhouses (they are shaped like wheels with spokes)  at Old Scatness right next to the airport.

Not only are there numerous Iron Age ruins on Shetland, but there are also many Viking sites. Many place names are of Viking origin. Shetlanders once had their own language called Norn which included Norse (Viking) words.

Replica of a Viking longhouse and boat at Haraldswick on the island of Unst. 

 Very spacious inside.

The Vikings held regular parliament gatherings on a tiny island in a large loch on the centre of the main island.

In 1469 Shetland was mortgaged to Scotland by the King of Denmark and Norway as part of a dowry for his daughter who married King James III of Scotland, and so begins Shetland's Scottish history. There are numerous medieval castle ruins. Scalloway Castle is the best preserved.

Its builder, Patrick Stewart, was not a nice man. Eventually his nastiness caught up with him and he was executed in 1615 for treason.

Poorer people - crofters (farmers) and fishermen etc. Lived in small two roomed cottages like this right into the early 20th century.

They used box beds with sliding doors to help keep warmth in. Two adults and/ or a number of children could sleep in each bed. Often a dozen or more people, three generations of a family, lived together in each cottage.

As in the rest of Scotland, many were evicted from their homes during Clearances during the 1800s when the lairds (landowners) decided they could make more money grazing large numbers of sheep than from collecting rent. There are ruined crofts, houses and stone walls everywhere.

Shetland has almost no trees. Humans consumed them long ago, but it has an abundance of peat; semi decayed plant material, almost coal, that is cut and stacked to dry out and then burned in fire places in the same way it has been done for many centuries. Peat fires do not smell very nice.

 And there is still a laird who owns a lot of the land although not as much as in the past. Laws were passed to protect small landowners from being unjustly evicted by lairds and to give them the right to buy the land. This is the current laird's house, built around 1600.

 The past is the present. People here are still very much in touch with their ancestors.

The far far north - Shetland

Shetland is all about the ponies and lack of sleep and weather and the far north and history and ponies!.

We have just come to the end of 6 days staying in a hostel in Lerwick in Shetland, in a 12 bed female dorm room with up to 6 other women, a number of whom snored. The latest one stayed two nights and kept everyone awake while she slept soundly. The night before that we had a girl who woke us all up at 2.30am screaming "HELP!" and then mumbled 'Sorry, it was only a dream'. Let's say, I am not exactly a fan of dorm sleeping.

The days are long. Sunrise at 4am and sunset at 10pm. Not a lot of rain, but plenty of cloud, fog, wind, cold and sunshine. Our second day looked like this:

But we had a few days of this!

 And a bit of this. But almost no rain.

Shetland is the UK's northern most place. It a group of 300 islands, 16 of which are inhabitated by 23,000 people. We visited 7 islands - Shetland, Muckle Roe, Mousa, East Burra, West Burra, Yell and Unst.

The UK's northern most house is a single farm house at Skane on the island of Unst. Skane is as far north as the southern tip of Greenland!

 The UK's northern most lighthouse is Muckle Flugga, on a rock near Skane.

We were buzzed three times by 2 RAF Typhoon jets while photographing the lighthouse from a hill topped by a radar installation. We know that's what the jets were because a man in uniform appeared. He was quite excited to see the planes flying over. We were actually more worried about the bonxies, more correctly called Giant Skuas. These are a large sea bird that will attack humans quite viciously if we stray too close to their nests. There were a lot of bonxies soaring on the air currents above us and they are five or six times bigger than magpies.

 The UK's northern most tea house is Victoria's Tea House in Haraldswick on Unst. We had morning tea and lunch here because there is not much else at Haraldswick.

Even this far north we could not escape the royal wedding! Victoria was flying this flag.

Not quite the northern most bus stop, but almost. This one is famous as a local decorates it regularly. The current theme celebrates Emily Pankhurst and the Suffragettes' campaigns for votes for women. It even has a visitors book which I wrote in.

We also put pins into two visitors maps here, one in the museum at Haraldswick where we were the only Tasmanians and another at an information centre at Hoswick on the main island of Shetland where there was one other pin on the east coast of Tassie. We love telling people we come from Tasmania and then watching their puzzled expressions as they try to work out where in the world that is. We usually have to add "It's in Australia - the island at the bottom."

This is Lerwick, home to over 7,000 people - a third of Shetland's population.

350 year old Fort Charlotte, in the middle of town.

 Lerwick is a port town - lots of docks for cargo, ferries, oil, fishing and cruises.

Old wooden boats make good shed roofs in a place that has virtually no trees left for wood. We saw several of these sheds. 

 If you have watched the Shetland series on TV, you should recognise this house.

A small version of newer wooden houses being built on Shetland, painted in many different colours. Very Scandinavian.

Not Lerwick, but it shows the Scandi house colours.

Ponies and an Iron Age broch in the suburbs.

More on the history in the next post!

Shetland does not feel at all Scottish even though it is officially part of Scotland. It has more of a Scandinavian, or Norwegian feel, but it is not Norwegian either. It is something else, something other, something all on its own.