WE’VE ALL left something behind and failed to retrieve it – a scarf, an umbrella – but few people can match the negligence of King Christian I of Denmark. Short of a few bob, he pawned the Shetland Islands to Scotland in 1469 but never came back to reclaim them, and Shetland has been Scottish ever since.
Political arrangements come and go but geography is a more obstinate beast, and as one clears the cliffs at Sumburgh Head to land on Shetland the Scandinavian ambience is unmistakable. For a start, there is the absence of trees and the presence every mile or two along the coast of a long fjordic inlet or “voe”.
Shetland is closer to the Faroe Islands than it is to Edinburgh, and is on the same latitude as Oslo, while Sumburgh Head is an excellent place to view passing killer whales. The drive from the airport to the island’s main town turns up its share of placenames – Exnaboe, Ring Asta, Boddam, Fladdabister – with the feel of a Viking saga. Had my visit been in January I could have seen this Viking heritage brought to life in the festival of Up Helly Aa, during which a longship is paraded through the streets of Lerwick before being burned.
As it was, I was in town for the Wordplay festival at the invitation of Hebridean poet Donald Murray. Murray's presence aside, Gaelic has never been spoken on Shetland, but the now-extinct Norn was the everyday tongue of more remote parts until the 19th century. Shetland English is full of its traces: Dunna chuck bruck(don't throw away your rubbish), litter bins warn, while the bird names are gloriously quirky – fulmars are maalies, cormorants muckle skarfs,and puffins tammie nories.
Someone who saw his fair share of seabirds in the company of Shetland fishermen was poet Hugh MacDiarmid, who made his home on the small island of Whalsay in the 1930s, settling in the improbably named townland of Sodom. This was a bad time in MacDiarmid's life, but it did yield his great poem On a Raised Beach, a visionary meditation on the elemental beauty of these isles ("I must begin with these stones as the world began"). A more recent poet visitor is Jen Hadfield, whose Nigh-No-Placeis an excellent window into the imaginative geography of Shetland today.
From Jen Hadfield’s home on Burra on the west of Shetland, tantalising glimpses can be had of the rugged outline of Foula, often described as the most remotely inhabited island in the British Isles. Michael Powell filmed The Edge of the World here in 1937, a dramatisation of the depopulation of St Kilda, but Foula survived where St Kilda and the Blaskets did not, even if no more than 31 hardy souls live there today.
South of the mainland lies Fair Isle, ideal destination for birdwatchers in search of a colourful knitted jumper. Legend ascribes the Fair Isle patterns to Spanish sailors shipwrecked during the period of the Armada, but this is disputed. Further north is Fetlar, home in summer to 90 per cent of Britain’s red-throated phalaropes, a beautiful bird with an unusual line in gender role reversal. Having laid their eggs the females fly the nest, leaving the males to incubate the chicks.
An altogether less cuddly specimen is the great skua or “bonxie” bird. This large, dirty brown predator lives by kleptoparasitism: it harries other birds into regurgitating their fish catches, which it then eats. It will also kill other seabirds and dive-bomb humans foolish enough to approach its nest. Fulmars, guillemots and cormorant also abound. Climate change has left the bird population vulnerable to rapid changes, however: puffins are in decline, while kittiwake numbers have crashed disastrously.
The great gannetries of Shetland are an epic sight. Messy, insatiable and with “the manners of a velociraptor”, in the words of my guide on a cruise round the Noup of Noss, the gannet chick is a hardy beast. Its downy feathers are not waterproof, which spells a watery death for any chicks unlucky enough to fall off their cliff perches. Even when they fledge, they remain unable to fly. Instead, they swim for up to 10 days, living off their fat reserves and strengthening their wings before taking to the air.
My host, Donald Murray, has written an account of the annual hunt still practised by the natives of Lewis, which sees them sail to the outlying islet of Sula Sgeir and harvest a catch of baby gannet, or guga. And what does it taste like? Stringy, I’m told.
THE WEST COAST,in particular around Eshaness, boasts some of the most striking of Shetland landscapes. In answer to the question of what people actually do in these remote parts, the answer can sometimes be surprising. Looking out to Papa Stour from the hamlet of Sandness, I was unaware that the tiny island of Forvik Holm held the key to one of the most unusual and comical of recent Shetland stories. In 2008 the disputed owner of Forvik, Stuart Hill (best known in the press as "Captain Calamity" for his frequent maritime mishaps), declared the island an independent nation under old Norse udal law. Visitors to his website are offered honorary citizenship and the chance to purchase a one square metre plot of "Forwegian" land.
Underneath the layers of self-delusion and publicity stunt lurks the small but real possibility that Hall could be right (the question is by no means settled). Free Forvik now!
As for Lerwick, the town struck me as a mix of The Wicker Manand The Birds, a theory I was tempted to try out on film critic Mark Kermode, who was attending the Screenplay festival. Monster gulls perch on every roof, and mysterious laneways snake their way up the hillside or down to former smugglers' coves.
Overlooking the town is Fort Charlotte, which saw off Dutch attackers in 1667, though Shetlanders probably had more to fear from the British navy: the pressgangs were much feared here, and locals would hide in sea caves when they were in town.
Hunting lodge-style luxury, such as one encounters in the Western Isles, is not a feature of Shetland life, and even where whiskey is concerned Shetland is out of step, only acquiring its first distillery in 2002. The local seafood was off-limits to this vegetarian, but a good curry can be had in Raba’s or the Ghurka Kitchen. The local Valhalla beer goes down nicely too.
Lerwick is probably more of a jumping-off point for the rest of the island than a destination in itself, but the Shetland museum is excellent and the Mareel cinema and concert venue under construction looks promising. But most of all it is the empty beaches and whale-like headlands that compel the imagination and make Shetland such a special place.
It is a rare and uncanny experience to find oneself the only human presence on an uninhabited island. I had this pleasure late one afternoon, walking round St Ninian’s Isle accompanied only by the odd Shetland wren and marauding bonxie bird, basking in the combination of grandeur and desolation.
There are monastic ruins, under which a treasure hoard was found by a local schoolboy in 1958. The wonder of it all is compounded by the unique tombolo by which the island is reached, a long sandy isthmus caused by the waves washing round the island behind it from both sides. One need not be Moses to walk on dry land with the sea to both left and right, I have now learned, but the effect is no less spectacular for that.
As promised lands go one could do a lot worse than Shetland.
Get there
Daily Flybe(flybe.com) service from Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Inverness to Sumburgh Airport.
For accommodationtry the Alder Lodge Guesthouse (alder-lodge.co.uk or tel 00-44-01595-695705). Singles from £45 (€52). The Lerwick Hotel (shetlandhotels.com or tel 00-44-01595 692166) has singles from £95 (€109).