There is a magic to summer nights in Shetland. At sixty degrees north, the sun barely dips below the horizon. It sets after 10pm giving 19 hours of daylight.
But numbers tell us little about how it feels to be surrounded by the simmer dim, Shetland's almost perpetual summer light.
Simmer dim refers to the time around midsummer, when after the sun has set, light lingers. It is neither daylight or darkness, but an uncanny in-between time, an extended twilight blurring the boundaries between day and night.
I walked into this midnight landscape as the last colours of sunset faded into the sea. Along the horizon burnished orange merged with peach, honeysuckle yellow before becoming a gradient of darkening blues. The quality of this light transforms the sea, its luminescent silver appearing lit from within, as if it was the source of the strange light.
It was a night without wind, and the slight rippling of the water barely made a sound. A wheatear perched nearby, small body moving with song as it’s voice filled the air around us. The lilting, bubbling call of curlew periodically erupted and in the distance I could hear the faint drumming of snipe.
Along the horizon burnished orange merged with peach, honeysuckle yellow before becoming a gradient of darkening blues.
Watching the shifting patterns of light I began to notice the details of the stone I was sitting on. Lines of pink and white ran thought the grey while it’s weathered surface provided home for lichens, each embellished with fine strands of sheep’s wool.
I love the connections and stories in Shetland stones. The islands' geology, shaped by deserts, oceans, ice ages and volcanos, is the most diverse in Europe. Because of the relatively few good cultivatable areas, across the archipelago the same places have been settled for thousands of years. Stones from neolithic houses becoming the walls of Iron Age brochs then traditional croft houses. These stories of these stones continue as crumbling walls provide homes for nesting fulmar and starlings, flowers and lichens growing from cracks and crevices
Sitting in the simmer dim, in the shifting moments between day and night, this history somehow feels more real, tangible, present in the landscape.
I watched as a line of sheep, each with a lamb behind her, wove their way through the cotton grass and I thought about the ebb and flow of life here. Soon these sheep would be sheared, their wool perhaps to be spun and transformed into the island’s famous knitwear. In autumn some of the lambs will be sold, others kept, forming the next generations of the flock. Next spring the cycle begins anew as lambs are born as people and animals continue to live and belong to this rugged, beautiful, landscape.