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 slight green mound holds a scatter of old stones. Nothing announces itself. No brown tourist sign says look here. But look closer and the humps and bumps begin to resolve into something deliberate — walls, maybe, or what walls once were.
This is the kirk that was never finished. The legend is blunt about why: unseen powers pulled down at night whatever the builders raised by day. When a priest finally volunteered to stand watch through the dark hours, he was found dead in the rubble come morning.1Cluness, Andrew T. THE SHETLAND ISLES. Page 196. 1956. Robert Hale Limited. Whether you believe that or not is your own affair.
The Ordnance Survey, who do not traffic in ghosts, were satisfied the ruins are a genuine old church — “supposed to be pre-Reformation,” as their antiquities notes put it. Later, less reverently, it was “repaired at several times and used for penning cattle.” They also record its other name: the Old Kirk. “Glet” means old. The name says everything and explains nothing.2Trov.scot. Glettna Kirk. https://www.trove.scot/place/63https://www.trove.scot/place/63
On the north side, enclosed by a wall in rather poor condition, lies a burial ground. Ancient, by all accounts. Long disused.
The stones sit there quietly. They have been sitting there a long time.
- 1Cluness, Andrew T. THE SHETLAND ISLES. Page 196. 1956. Robert Hale Limited.
- 2Trov.scot. Glettna Kirk. https://www.trove.scot/place/63https://www.trove.scot/place/63