In the middle of August, I escaped the heat of what happened to be probably one of the hottest weeks in London on record, with temperatures above +30C, and headed north to enjoy the good weather in the Northern Isles - it was unusually warm at +18C and at times sunny.
Shetland is the northernmost part of the UK. The islands are at the same latitude with Alaska, the southern tip of Greenland and Saint Petersburg (and Petrozavodsk, for that matter). Around 400 million years ago things were a little different and Shetland was a desert close to the South Pole. What's more, around 3 billion years ago Shetland was connected to North America, just like Scotland. Scotland and North America were for quite a while separated from England and Europe by the ancient ocean, but some 500 million years ago Scotland (thankfully / unfortunately / to complicate things / insert how you feel about it) bumped into England, and a mountain range was created as high as the present-day Himalayas that ran from Norway through Shetland and Scotland to Ireland and Newfoundland. That's where all Scotland's volcanoes are located (no worries, they are all extinct now. But still there.).
This great short video kindly posted online by the Shetland Museum in Lerwick gives a great idea of Shetland's journey through history. Shetland is marked with a dot.
Shetland is a geologist's heaven, and even for a complete non-geologist like me it is quite exciting to see that its land mass is so layered and clearly holds in itself a lot of stories about the life of our planet, most of them still waiting to be explored.
I could not find any information about it but I humbly think the stones may be covered with ash from an eruption of some extinct Scottish or now dormant (or not dormant) volcano in Iceland.
Not being qualified to talk about geology any longer, I will present a quick account of the journey itself.
Quite some (millions of) years after Shetland arrived at its current place on the map, the town of Lerwick became the capital of Shetland. Not to complicate things, there are just two towns in Shetlands - current capital Lerwick and old capital Scalloway. Lerwick is more than ten times bigger than Scalloway though with 9,000 citizens, while the whole of 300 islands of Shetland account for some 23,000 inhabitants. Social distancing was so easy there - London feels twice as cramped as before upon return from the Shetlands.
The town's department store in the main street was founded in early 1960s by Harry Jamieson, who happened to be quite a prominent figure in the island. Not only was he the owner and manager of the store, but he was also heavily involved with a variety of organisations such as Lerwick Port Authority, Living Lerwick and Lerwick Spurs FC. As local newspaper The Shetland Times reports, he "...was chairman of the port authority which runs Lerwick harbour and chairman of Living Lerwick, which promotes the town centre, and the coach of Lerwick Spurs. Harry started off with his famous barber shop in 1962 and gradually extended the shop and built up the retail business, starting with toys before expanding into a wide range of household goods."
Interestingly, later on, we would pass by a shop selling woolen items called "Jamieson's". Definitely an important family name on the islands. This business is older, going back to the 1890s, and throughout 5 generations of the owners' family has been specialising in wool from the native Shetland sheep. The business managed to survive the oil boom when the number of hand-knitters sharply dropped on the islands as people moved to the new industry, and is currently focused on unique Shetland knitted products.
Our gastronomic experience was absolutely fantastic despite many places being closed due to the covid situation. We stumbled upon a French cafe (run by a native Parisian) and indulged in some finely cooked local produce. Local 'fish and chips' that we had for takeaway the other day beat all fish and chips I had previously by a mile. The mackerel was to die for. Scallops, salmon, lobster, you name it. Seafoodies' paradise it is...
Food of a real Scot though is this (obviously, the view included):
Or this:
On top of this sandwich is a traditional Scottish tattie scone. It is a mystery why it is so unlike a traditional British scone. "Tattie" means "potato" in the Scots language, and the tattie scone reminded me of classical "draniki" or hashbrowns, just made of smoother potato purée.
Overnight, we stayed in Scalloway to look around another part of the Mainland (that's how the main island is called).
Architecture does reflect the long history of the settlement - this castle for instance was built before Shetland became British, and not so long after it became Scottish after centuries of being Norwegian.
Scalloway was the first capital of Shetland because of its convenient location in a sheltered cove convenient to harbour quite a sizeable fleet. This feature was widely used in modern times, and during World War II Scalloway hosted a military harrison as Shetland islands were considered of strategic importance once Norway got occupied by the Germans in 1940. Scalloway was a base for the Shetland Bus operation that was active during 1940-1945. "Shetland buses" referred to fishing boats (later complemented with three larger better-armed vessels) that travelled between Norway and Shetland transferring secret intelligence agents in and out of Norway and providing them and the Norwegian resistance with weapons, radios and other supplies.
During the day, Scalloway is pretty empty as many people leave for work in Lerwick. With less that a thousand inhabitants, it though is unlikely to feel particularly crowded at any other time. It is totally worth having a stroll along the main streets, around the Scalloway Castle, and dropping by the Scalloway Museum. The Museum was closed when we visited but hopefully it reopens in 2021. My impressions of the Museum of Shetland in Lerwick were absolutely fantastic, so I would expect that the Scalloway Museum could be, too, a worthy place to visit.
Notably, you won't see any signs in Gaelic around the islands, which is visible in many towns of Mainland Scotland. Shetland has a very Scandinavian feel, to my mind. To date, the islands have spent more time with the Viking culture than with the British.
On the topic of Shetland ponies: one Irish marquis in the end of the 19th century rented out Shetland's isle of Noss for 30 years to breed Shetland ponies in order to replace child labor with theirs at his coal mines...
If you watched closely you probably did not see any person other than three friends of mine in the pictures. This gives a very precise idea of what our stay at the Shetlands was - calm, peaceful, and socially distanced.
