The great Shetland bucket list: Part V

By Toby SkinnerJuly 6th 2021

With summer in full swing, welcome to the fifth and final part of our Shetland bucket list – from Jimmy Perez to uninhabited islands and the islands’ highest sea cliff.

41. Journey to a small isle

Part of the magic of a trip to one of Shetland’s smaller islands is simply getting there, either on a small plane or a ferry. The inter-island air service runs short flights on little propeller planes to Fair Isle, Foula and Skerries. None take more than half an hour, but passengers get stunning views of the islands over the captain’s shoulder. The ferry is an experience, too: like the Good Shepherd IV to Fair Isle, a former trawler that can take 12 passengers for the two-and-a-half-hour crossing; or the even smaller New Advance to Foula, another retooled fishing boat that can also take 12 people for a journey of just over two hours.

42. Get a selfie at Jimmy Perez’s house

Whether visitors are disappointed or relieved that Shetland is not actually a hotbed of crime, there’s no doubt that the Shetland TV series has raised awareness of the islands. And DI Jimmy Perez’s fictional house, the Lodberry on the Lerwick waterfront, is as pretty in real life as in the show, with a traditional wooden yoal boat sitting outside. If you want to go further, local tour guide Laurie Goodlad offers tours themed around the TV show.

43. Hike Papa Stour

Surrounded by steep cliffs, remote Papa Stour was once where suspected lepers were sent. Today, it’s a Special Area of Conservation, beloved by naturalists, divers and kayakers. The eight-hour circular hike round the island is one of the most epic in Shetland, packed with caves, skerries and natural arches. With large numbers of seals and breeding otters, this is the Shetland coastline at its wildest and most dramatic.

44. Find an island to yourself

Only 16 of Shetland’s 300 or so islands and skerries are inhabited–but they’re not the only ones that are worth visiting. There are uninhabited islands to be found across the archipelago, but there’s a cluster of beautiful islands off the west of the Mainland, close to Scalloway – including Oxna, uninhabited since the First World War, and rocky South Havra, whose last resident left in 1923. Nearby Hildasay is where charity walker Chris Lewis holed up with his dog Jet during the first lockdown, part of his plan to walk the entire British coast. The Swan, a fishing sail boat built in 1900 and beautifully restored, offers day trips around the Scalloway Isles, including other unpopulated islands like Linga, Papa and Green Holm.

45. Get immersed in a Shetland festival

Few places do festivals quite like Shetland, where the celebrations seem to take over the entire community. The best-known is Up Helly Aa, a series of torch-lit processions that take place across the islands in January and February, culminating in the burning of a replica Viking galley. If it’s the most atmospheric and immersive of Shetland festivals, others do come close. The Shetland Folk Festival in the spring sees local and international artists play across the islands, from village halls to the Mareel cultural centre, with jams often breaking out on ferries between the isles. Meanwhile, Wool Week in the autumn is one of the world’s most renowned textile festivals, with exhibitions, classes and events across the islands.

46. Feel the Viking spirit at Jarlshof

Near the southern tip of the Shetland Mainland, Jarlshof is one of the most remarkable archaeological sites in the UK, with Bronze Age ruins dating back to 800BC. But the Vikings who were here from the ninth to 14th Centuries left perhaps the biggest mark, including the first longhouse to be excavated in the UK, one of seven Norse houses. There are also several outbuildings, one of which is thought to have been a sauna – apt, given that a new public sauna is being planned for Lerwick.

47. Walk Shetland’s highest cliff on Foula

On the western edge of Foula, one of Shetland’s remote islands, the striated cliffs of Da Kame are the highest in Shetland at 326 metres (only St Kilda’s Conachair cliffs are higher in the UK). The steep climb to the cliff edge is one of the most dramatic in Shetland, and must be done carefully. But there’s a real poetry about looking west from here, knowing that the next land is the southern tip of Greenland.

48. See underwater

Even most Shetlanders don’t fully realise how rich the underwater life here is – from sea cliffs and gullies to wrecks like the World War I SS Gwladmena and 18th-century Queen of Sweden. The MV Valkyrie runs five-night liveaboard adventures round the islands, but it’s possible to get a taste of Shetland’s rich subsea life with just a snorkel and mask. Billy Arthur, who loves photographing Shetland’s bright nudibranchs and anemones, recommends the easily accessible kelp gullies at Peerie Voe in the South Mainland, inhabited by lobster, crab, anemones and cactus-like coral.

49. Feel the past on the Ness of Sound

You don’t have to walk far from Lerwick to get away from it all. At the end of the road past the Tesco supermarket on the southern edge of town, a ramble round the Ness of Sound peninsula feels like a true nature escape. This is a place of otters and silence, where the only real civilisation to be seen is the lighthouse on Bressay, across the water. Perhaps the most notable feature of the walk are the concrete World War Two military emplacements dotted around the cliffs – an evocative sign of Shetland’s wartime strategic importance.

50. See the Mirrie Dancers dance

The Northern Lights, or Mirrie Dancers in Shetland dialect, are the most ephemeral attraction on this list – shimmering, hard to find and hard to capture. But when they shine over the islands in the winter, there are few more spectacular sights. If you want to photograph them well, bring a tripod and be prepared for exposures as long as 30 seconds to really capture the greens and sometimes purples and pinks of one of Nature’s great shows.