The overnight NorthLink ferry from Aberdeen takes around twelve hours to reach Lerwick, Shetland’s only town and where almost everyone lands; Loganair also flies in to Sumburgh, at the island’s southern tip. Lerwick’s old stone harbourfront is lined with lodberries, merchants’ houses built with their own jetties running into the water, and behind them stands the 17th-century Fort Charlotte. Even Lerwick has its own broch, Clickimin, an Iron Age drystone tower on a loch within the town, reached by a stone causeway. Late January brings Lerwick’s Up Helly Aa, when squads of costumed guizers march by torchlight and burn a full-size Viking galley.
A few miles west, Scalloway was Shetland’s capital until 1708, its houses still gathered around the harbour below Scalloway Castle, a roofless tower house built around 1600 for Patrick Stewart, Earl of Orkney, using forced labour; he was executed in 1615 and the castle was left to fall down. During the Second World War, Scalloway was the base for the ‘Shetland Bus’, small boats that carried agents and supplies across the North Sea to occupied Norway.
At the southern tip, Jarlshof is a stack of settlements spanning some 4,000 years on one site — Bronze Age houses, an Iron Age broch, Norse longhouses, and a laird’s house from the 1600s — and next door, Sumburgh Head Lighthouse, built by Robert Stevenson in 1821, stands over cliffs where puffins nest close to the path in summer. In the far north-west of the Mainland, Eshaness cuts through the flank of an ancient volcano in a rampart of black cliffs, sea stacks and blowholes.
