Shetland
We arrived at our final destination in the British and Irish Isles, before heading due east for Bergen in Norway, on mid-summer’s eve, docking in Lerwick, the administrative capital of the Shetland archipelago.
We have plenty of daylight time therefore to reflect on a voyage of great complexity. We are culturally a world away from Portsmouth, all ships of the line and Union flags; in fact, you are as likely to see the Norwegian flag flying here as the Union Jack, such is the cultural affinity of the Shetlanders with their Scandinavian cousins. Norne, a Norse dialect, was spoken here into modern times and there is still contemporary poetry written in the local Norse-derived dialect. We have progressed from the Saxon shore of southern England through Arthurian Cornwall out to the Gaelic west of Ireland and Scotland, through the former thalassocracy of the Lordship of the Isles to arrive finally in the orbit of Scandinavia. Tiny Lerwick has a full-time Norwegian consul. There is an additional complicating factor: religion. A religious divide has run through the Britain and Ireland since the Reformation, a line that runs through both Scotland and Ireland. In Donegal we were in the geographical north of the country but in the political south. The Gaelic culture of Aran was Roman Catholic whereas the Gaelic culture of Lewis is Calvinist, indeed in that Calvinistic stronghold, until recently the children’s swings were locked at sundown on Saturday. Here in Shetland we are securely back in the Protestant north of Europe.
Complexity summed up our morning visit to Jarlshof, for it is one of the most complex archaeological sites in these islands. Fortunately our voyage had prepared us. We could distinguish the neolithic village from the remains of a late iron-age broch and could visualize the Vikings feasting in their characteristic hall, even if a new concept – the wheel-house – also had to be assimilated. The name Jarlshof itself is pure romance; Sir Walter Scott, the father of the historical novel, bestowed this name on the mediaeval house that crowns this multi-layered site.
There are some eight million sea birds in the British Isles in the summer months, and one million of those are to be found in Shetland. At Sumbrugh Head, at the southern tip of the main island, renowned for its Stevenson lighthouse, we had close encounters with puffins and good views of nesting kittiwakes and fulmars, guillemots and razorbills. Departing Lerwick after lunch, we cruised beneath the high cliffs of the Noup of Noss for further remarkable sightings of nesting colonies of Atlantic seabirds. One other example of Shetland fauna will remain in the memory, a field of Shetland ponies, waist high, with their new-born foals.
