Tag: history
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Vallafield — Where the Trows Lost Their Tune
The name tells you everything. Old Norse: ‘völlr’ for level ground, ‘fjall’ for hill. Between a craggy ridge and sea cliffs sits a narrow platform, barely a kilometre wide, which is precisely what you get. The name nowadays though is usually given to the high point on the ridge, the second highest on Unst. Now…
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Glettna Kirk: A Church Nobody Finished
Shetland has no tidy villages. The communities bleed into each other, and a visitor who tries to pin down where one ends and the next begins will give up before long. Unst is no exception. Which makes Glettna Kirk easy to miss. Just outside what passes for the edge of Uyeasound, beside the road, a…
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Muness Castle: Power, Corruption and Impunity. Sound Familiar?
Two Shetland ponies graze in front of Muness Castle, Unst, on a grey June afternoon. The castle has looked like this for quite some time. Laurence Bruce built Muness Castle in 1598. He was half-brother to the Earl of Orkney, sheriff of Shetland, and by most accounts an absolute tyrant. The Privy Council found him…
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Fethaland: Where Sixty Sixareens Braved the Atlantic
The name means “fat land.” Which is rather good, given what happened here. For roughly five centuries, up to sixty sixareens, open wooden boats with a crew of six, launched from this beach and rowed — or sailed, when the wind was kind — eighty kilometres into the open Atlantic, well past the continental shelf,…
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The Hams Mill
If it is not brochs, it is clack mills. On Shetland, you cannot seem to avoid one or the other, which is really no bad thing. This one sits at North Ham on the spectacular coast of Muckle Roe. “Ham” comes from the Norse for harbour. A weatherworn signpost points the way, just about legible…
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Stanydale Temple
A wide-angle lens is a master of deception. It makes the walls of Stanydale Temple look rather squat. I reckon they are about 1.5 metres in height. The Temple is a Neolithic pile of undressed stone. Of course, it’s not really a temple, folk have called it so since 1949. This is because it shares…
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The Scord of Brouster
We stumbled upon this site by chance. Hidden on Shetland’s west side sits one of Scotland’s oldest farming puzzles. Over 5,000 years ago, the Scord of Brouster was not the bleak, wind-battered moorland you see today. It was a working farm surrounded by scrubby hazel and birch woodland. These were New Stone Age settlers, and…
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Shadows over Scalloway: The Fateful Tale o’ Marion Pardone
Before the rope and the flames took her, she would have looked out over almost this exact view — the cold East Voe of Scalloway meeting the green hills of Mainland. In the 17th century, this hill — known variously as the Hill of Berry, the Hill of Houll, and Gallow Hill — served as…
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The Broch at Levenwick
This photograph looks across the Burn of Burgadies, which drains the Loch of Levenwick towards the sea. Beyond the boggy, pool-scattered moor, the broch stands sentinel on the higher ground. This rather damp approach from the nearest tarmac at Southpunds may go some way towards explaining why this remarkable site rarely features in visitors’ plans…
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The Noggle’s Playground: Folklore of the Horizontal Mill
Beneath a wide Shetland sky, a line of stone ruins follows the Burn of Clumlie toward the sea. These are “clack mills” — what is left of a row of nine horizontal water mills along a 450m stretch of the burn that once ground grain for local crofters north of Troswick. The engineering is rather…