A day at Sumburgh
Jun. 20th, 2019 10:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustAfter Monday's late start, we made an effort on Tuesday, and we did a lot of things, and what's more a very comprehensive selection of things, all of them very close to Sumburgh, at the southern tip of Mainland.
durham_rambler and I started with a visit to the airport - because we were passing, and because it used to be a convenient place to pick up the day's Guardian. But no longer: the new management at the café have decided they can't be bothered to run the little shop, said the nice lady at the Shetland crafts boutique, and there's no tourist information at the airport, either. We agreed this was silly.
Our real first destination was the lighthouse - or rather, the car park at the foot of the road up to the lighthouse. We had agreed to meet D. andvalydiarosada there, so we didn't even divert to the pier at Grutness, although we had seen the Good Shepherd (the Fair Isle ferry) coming in. The thing about Sumburgh light, apart from all the virtues inherent in lighthouses, is that the road up to the headland on which it stands is an excellent viewpoint from which to look down onto the seabirds nesting below: the fulmars on the cliff ledges, the guillemots huddled together on rocks jutting out of the waves, and best of all:
the puffins in their burrows in the grassy, thrift-pink cliff tops. I wrote at some length about the puffins of Sumburgh and elsewhere, and although that post has suffered a degree of link rot since I wrote it in 2009, it still covers the basics.
Some of us persevered up to the lighthouse and the shop, and purchased puffin-related articles (but did not tour the visitor centre); others peeled off early. Eventually we were reunited at our next destination, the archaeological site of Jarlshof. People have lived here, on and off, for four thousand years, so there's a wonderful tangle of ruined walls, and the puzzle of what is overlaying what at any given point:
I think the curved wall here is not the broch, but a later wheelhouse; and above it the manor house, fortified by the Stewart Earls of Orkney, and the only building visible on the site when Walter Scott visited (in the company of Robert Stevenson, on a tour of inspection of existing lighthouses and assessing potential sites, such as Sumburgh, for more). At the end of the nineteenth century, a violent storm ripped away the land that covered the broch (and half of the broch with it), then came the excavations that revealed the bronze age settlement, the Viking longhouses, the medieval farm (so similar to the pattern of the ruined farms dotted all over Shetland); no airport, no lighthouse, no Jarlshof Hotel, just a grassy mound and the ruins of the manor house. When Scott wrote his novel The Pirate, set in the northern isles, he gave it the name Jarlshof, and the name has stuck. Our visit to Jarlshof on this occasion was in two parts: a combination of factors - the weather and the presence of parties from visiting cruise ships - culminated in our being cornered by a particularly forceful group in a particularly sharp downpour; since our English Heritage membership cards give us free entry, it made sense to join D. andvalydiarosada for lunch in the lounge bar of the Jarlshof Hotel. Over scallops and a bottle of Old Scatness, we agreed that we would also accompany them to the nearby archaeological site of Old Scatness, where another broch had been discovered, this time during the construction of a new access road for the airport. Here, too, the visible remains are a tangle of overlying buildings, but here you can see how the small houses might have looked by visiting a reconstruction, complete with roof and smoking peat fire. And by the time we returned to Jarlshof, both the rain and the crowds had cleared, and we completed our tour in peace and in glorious sunshine.
durham_rambler and I started with a visit to the airport - because we were passing, and because it used to be a convenient place to pick up the day's Guardian. But no longer: the new management at the café have decided they can't be bothered to run the little shop, said the nice lady at the Shetland crafts boutique, and there's no tourist information at the airport, either. We agreed this was silly.Our real first destination was the lighthouse - or rather, the car park at the foot of the road up to the lighthouse. We had agreed to meet D. and
valydiarosada there, so we didn't even divert to the pier at Grutness, although we had seen the Good Shepherd (the Fair Isle ferry) coming in. The thing about Sumburgh light, apart from all the virtues inherent in lighthouses, is that the road up to the headland on which it stands is an excellent viewpoint from which to look down onto the seabirds nesting below: the fulmars on the cliff ledges, the guillemots huddled together on rocks jutting out of the waves, and best of all:the puffins in their burrows in the grassy, thrift-pink cliff tops. I wrote at some length about the puffins of Sumburgh and elsewhere, and although that post has suffered a degree of link rot since I wrote it in 2009, it still covers the basics.
Some of us persevered up to the lighthouse and the shop, and purchased puffin-related articles (but did not tour the visitor centre); others peeled off early. Eventually we were reunited at our next destination, the archaeological site of Jarlshof. People have lived here, on and off, for four thousand years, so there's a wonderful tangle of ruined walls, and the puzzle of what is overlaying what at any given point:
I think the curved wall here is not the broch, but a later wheelhouse; and above it the manor house, fortified by the Stewart Earls of Orkney, and the only building visible on the site when Walter Scott visited (in the company of Robert Stevenson, on a tour of inspection of existing lighthouses and assessing potential sites, such as Sumburgh, for more). At the end of the nineteenth century, a violent storm ripped away the land that covered the broch (and half of the broch with it), then came the excavations that revealed the bronze age settlement, the Viking longhouses, the medieval farm (so similar to the pattern of the ruined farms dotted all over Shetland); no airport, no lighthouse, no Jarlshof Hotel, just a grassy mound and the ruins of the manor house. When Scott wrote his novel The Pirate, set in the northern isles, he gave it the name Jarlshof, and the name has stuck. Our visit to Jarlshof on this occasion was in two parts: a combination of factors - the weather and the presence of parties from visiting cruise ships - culminated in our being cornered by a particularly forceful group in a particularly sharp downpour; since our English Heritage membership cards give us free entry, it made sense to join D. and
valydiarosada for lunch in the lounge bar of the Jarlshof Hotel. Over scallops and a bottle of Old Scatness, we agreed that we would also accompany them to the nearby archaeological site of Old Scatness, where another broch had been discovered, this time during the construction of a new access road for the airport. Here, too, the visible remains are a tangle of overlying buildings, but here you can see how the small houses might have looked by visiting a reconstruction, complete with roof and smoking peat fire. And by the time we returned to Jarlshof, both the rain and the crowds had cleared, and we completed our tour in peace and in glorious sunshine.
