Tag: history
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Lunna: the Truck System, the Oldest Kirk and the Secret War
Lunnasting drives a wild, rocky finger of land deep into the eastern mouth of Yell Sound. The men who lived here were something rather more than fishermen. “Never spaek o da Lunnasting men” — the old saying said it all. They were beyond ordinary reckoning. That narrow strip of land is all that keeps Lunna…
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Otters Wick: The End of the Bohus
The tranquil waters of Otters Wick hides a tragic history. In the above photo, Black Skerry sits darkly left of centre; just out of shot to the left lies the jagged headland where the steel barque Bohus was lost in April 1924. The tragedy came down to a single, stupid mistake. Seeking a bearing in…
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Planticrubs: Shetland’s Ingenious Stone Nurseries
Looking south over the village of Burravoe on the island of Yell, a planticrub sits on the hillside like a small, collapsed fort that never quite finished deciding what it wanted to be. These dry-stone enclosures are scattered across Shetland in their hundreds, most of them abandoned. They look like the ruins of huts. They…
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Gloup Voe: The Day the Voe Went Silent
Look at Gloup Voe now. Serene. Quiet. Almost insulting in its calm, given what happened here on 20 July 1881. My previous post covered the haaf fishing station at Fethaland, but the station at Gloup is something else entirely. That Wednesday morning, the North Yell fleet put out into what the men called a “day…
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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…