Hermaness, a National Nature Reserve on Unst’s northern tip, has one of Britain’s biggest seabird colonies, with puffins, gannets and great skuas crowding the cliffs and moorland above the sea. From the reserve you can see Muckle Flugga, a lighthouse completed in 1858 on a stac, a steep rock islet, just short of Britain’s most northerly point.
Unst itself is Britain’s most northerly inhabited island, a ten-minute car ferry from Gutcher on Yell to Belmont. Near Uyeasound in the south, Muness Castle is a roofless tower house built in 1598 for the sheriff Laurence Bruce and burnt out by privateers from Dunkirk in 1627; you can walk round it for free. Archaeologists have found a Viking-age longhouse close to an Iron Age broch, a drystone tower, at Underhoull, one of several such pairings on the island. Near Baltasound, islanders have fitted out Bobby’s Bus Shelter with a sofa and curtains since the 1990s, redecorating it most years.
