Boats crowd the harbour at Symbister, home to some of Shetland’s biggest fishing boats and the base for an island economy still built on the sea. The car ferry crosses in about thirty minutes from Laxo, on the Shetland Mainland, switching to Vidlin when the weather turns; the same Vidlin pier also serves the ferry out to Out Skerries.
By the harbour, the old Pier House was a Hanseatic booth, where German merchants from Hamburg, Bremen and Lübeck traded cloth, salt and tools for dried fish between the 1400s and 1707; it’s now a small museum. Inland at Sodom, the poet Hugh MacDiarmid lived in a plain croft house for nine years from 1933, writing some of his best-known work. The croft was later let out as a böd, Shetland’s word for simple hostel accommodation in an old building.
