Shetland always has something new to discover

The plan was to leave Shetland on 23 December and not return until this week, having spent a leisurely Christmas and New Year with the extended family on the Scottish mainland, probably in a holiday house. There would have been dogs, children and their partners, grandchildren, even my dad if he was well enough. Eating, drinking and arguing.

That was the idea back in late 2019, anyway, when Susan, as she has to do, was setting up GP locum cover for the year ahead. She was looking forward to Christmas 2020, she said, as it would be the first time in 40 years of medicine she’d actually had both Christmas and New Year without being on call.

Things, as you may realise, didn’t work out. By early autumn we’d tentatively agreed to head for Glasgow and have Christmas dinner with one son and his family. But as infection rates rose inexorably, we began to realise that we were heading instead, like so many others, for festivities on our own, alleviated by Facetime and Zoom; the sight and sound of remote grandbairns.

And as Christmas loomed, things in Shetland deteriorated markedly, as detailed in last week’s newsletter. From New Year, infections slowed initially, or those reported and recorded did. There are signs now that Covid is still escalating in the community. And that’s in our micro-local area within Shetland well as the islands generally. One house visited, one hour, one cup of tea: like some dreadful game of invisible pass-the-parcel, the virus moves and spreads.

Christmas and New Year in Northmavine brought fine, still often sunny weather. So we found ourselves, as a couple, doing the things we did when I first arrived in Shetland to visit this woman I’d met in a Glasgow pub. We went for walks. So did a lot of other people, but Shetland’s open spaces are large and empty enough for that to happen without any urban park crushing and crowding. Frankly, if I see a figure in the distance, I just head to another, deserted quadrant of the compass.

Eshaness drew us, as it always does, with its spectacular sea cliffs and the eternal crash and swell of the waves far below. It’s a place to think about the future. The long -term future. And so we contacted the council and chose a double-depth grave in my favourite cemetery, one old enough to have once been a site of pagan pilgrimage for healing.  Which infuriated a 17th century Kirk Minister called Hercules so much he burnt the chapel down. Not that the Mayday sacrifices (coins and flowers only) stopped. It’s a place where trows (trolls)  have been reported, a poor woman was found to have committed witchcraft (she was burned to death in boiling pitch)  and a strange gravestone commemorates what may have been a murder. Tom Anderson, father of modern Shetland fiddle music, is buried nearby. And we will be too. Plot 57, if you’re interested. You can see the natural arch called the Dore Holm. The haaf fishing station called Stenness. You can see the Edge of the World.

Just as during that romantic encounter with Shetland, 34 years ago, there have been, for me, new discoveries. As the light began fading we drove to North Roe, the northernmost part of the Shetland Mainland, some 10 miles from where we stay. The abandoned cemetery (barely used; I think two bodies were exhumed and reburied when it became obvious the soil depth was inadequate) which is now the splendid Nort Trow Community Garden, complete with the Shetland Croft House Garden which won gold at the Chelsea Flower Show.

I’d been there before, but never to Sandvoe, which is like an illustration from a half-remembered childhood book: A long beach, hard packed sand at low tide, facing a steep-sided, zig-zag voe or sea loch, as spectacular a fjord in miniature as you could ever see. 

The sun began to dip below the Ronas massif, its last rays glinting on the house called Benegarth – beloved of an old, late friend – which you can only reach by driving along the beach and up a steep track. Susan told stories.  We drank coffee from a Thermos, walked back west into the sunset.

As I write, the Scottish mainland is in full lockdown and most folk in Shetland can’t understand why we continue, for the moment, in “tier three”. A lot of hospitality businesses are closed to sit-in customers anyway. We can still get the best takeaway fish and chips in the world, just down the road in Brae. This afternoon we ate our superb Frankie’s haddock and chips by the marina, the breakwater light flashing red, reminding me of Bowling Basin, where the Forth and Clyde Canal has its western terminus. Suddenly I’m remembering a hot summer day at Bowling, long before the gentrification of the canal and its environs, watching bairns jump into the scrap-infested, filthy water from the disused railway bridge. Risking injury, illness, death.

We start the pickup and head home to Hillswick.We’ve had a very late lunch or an early tea, and it’s 25 to four. It’s still just about light. The days get longer quickly at this time of year. Spring’s on its way. Soon be Christmas.