Simmer Dim on Mousa
Jun. 22nd, 2019 10:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustWhere does the time go? It is Saturday, and we are back on board the MV Hrossey. Fair Isle has fallen behind us, the solstice is past, and we are leaving the north. But I was part way through writing about what we did on Wednesday -
Through the day we took it easy. A stroll along to the stream took us to the visitor centre at Hoswick, where we had lunch. All-day breakfast fordurham_rambler, mackerel pâté for me, we are nothing if not predictable. A visit to the two contrasting knitwear shops: the utterly traditional Laurence Odie, with its display of Fair Isle scarves with a Viking longboat design and its plaque commemorating the visit of the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh and Princess Anne in the 1960s, and next door NielaNell, "The alternative Shetland knitwear". Later we visited the water mill at Quendale, and walked on the beach at Levenwick (which we can see from our balcony here at Sandwick). All very gentle, because we were saving ourselves for the excitement of a boat trip to Mousa:
We embarked at 10.30 for the ten minute crossing, so what you see in the picture is the Solan IV at the jetty at about 10.45 pm. After a briefing we set off to walk to the broch - yes, another broch, and there are many others, but this one is exceptional, the most complete in existence, the one that confirms what the others would once have looked like. I wasn't checking the time, but this must be somewhere between eleven and midnight.
If our visit had been for the purpose of visiting the broch - and another time it might be - we wouldn't have set off at dusk. But we were there for the storm petrels, little birds which nest on Mousa in extraordinary numbers. Except that they don't exactly nest: they find a cranny among the stones, and lay their eggs there. Even before we reached the broch we could hear them: as we passed through a dry stone wall, a fellow visitor called us aside, to listen to the wall itself. We heard a quiet chirring noise, followed by a squawk, over and over again. Shetland naturalist Bobby Tulloch is credited with the description that it's "like a fairy being sick," (repeated here, with audio file (probably, though I haven't had a chance to listen to it). It made me think of kittens, who haven't quite worked out how purring works. Further along, we heard it again, from a scattering of loose stone along the seashore.
Thousands of pairs of the birds live on the island, and several hundred of these live in the walls of the broch. They don't seem to bee shy of people; and we were issued with torches we could set to give a red light, which doesn't bother the birds either. So we could go inside the broch, and the more intrepid of us could climb the staircase - the original iron age stairs - between the walls to the top. I didn't do that, but I enjoyed sitting in the dark of the broch, listening to the birds chirring and watching the red lights coming and going in the walls. Eventually, though, we were all waiting outside:
waiting for the birds who were out in search of food to return to the nest. We had been congratulating ourselves on the fine night, after a rainy early evening, but this had its downside: the birds stayed out later. Eventually, though, we began to see them flittering around the tower, and then finding their way back to their own individual cavity. By now, around one o' clock, it was pretty dark, and sometimes all I could see of a little black bird was its white rump, as it squeezed itself into a tiny gap between the stones - and then it would beat its wings to hold itself in position, and I could make out the shape of the bird.
I admit that I found the walk out to the broch tricky: I'm a slow walker, especially on uneven ground (there's a reason why we stopped walking with the Ramblers). And the walk back, in the nearest to actual darkness we saw in all our time in Shetland, was worse: the little torches were brilliant at illuminating the ground for the next step, less so for finding the track three steps ahead. The Mousa boat staff were endlessly patient and helpful, and I hope I've conveyed how much the trip was absolutely worth it. And before two o' clock we were back on the boat, and the sky was pink with the promise of morning:
So when it came to getting up to watch the sun rise on the solstice itself, I admit I wasn't enthusiastic: hadn't we done that already?durham_rambler and D. got up, and I looked out of the window at the solid cloud cover and declined to join them - and the sun, of course, did not visibly rise. As I write this, though, it is setting into the sea in a blaze of red and gold.
Through the day we took it easy. A stroll along to the stream took us to the visitor centre at Hoswick, where we had lunch. All-day breakfast for
durham_rambler, mackerel pâté for me, we are nothing if not predictable. A visit to the two contrasting knitwear shops: the utterly traditional Laurence Odie, with its display of Fair Isle scarves with a Viking longboat design and its plaque commemorating the visit of the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh and Princess Anne in the 1960s, and next door NielaNell, "The alternative Shetland knitwear". Later we visited the water mill at Quendale, and walked on the beach at Levenwick (which we can see from our balcony here at Sandwick). All very gentle, because we were saving ourselves for the excitement of a boat trip to Mousa:We embarked at 10.30 for the ten minute crossing, so what you see in the picture is the Solan IV at the jetty at about 10.45 pm. After a briefing we set off to walk to the broch - yes, another broch, and there are many others, but this one is exceptional, the most complete in existence, the one that confirms what the others would once have looked like. I wasn't checking the time, but this must be somewhere between eleven and midnight.
If our visit had been for the purpose of visiting the broch - and another time it might be - we wouldn't have set off at dusk. But we were there for the storm petrels, little birds which nest on Mousa in extraordinary numbers. Except that they don't exactly nest: they find a cranny among the stones, and lay their eggs there. Even before we reached the broch we could hear them: as we passed through a dry stone wall, a fellow visitor called us aside, to listen to the wall itself. We heard a quiet chirring noise, followed by a squawk, over and over again. Shetland naturalist Bobby Tulloch is credited with the description that it's "like a fairy being sick," (repeated here, with audio file (probably, though I haven't had a chance to listen to it). It made me think of kittens, who haven't quite worked out how purring works. Further along, we heard it again, from a scattering of loose stone along the seashore.
Thousands of pairs of the birds live on the island, and several hundred of these live in the walls of the broch. They don't seem to bee shy of people; and we were issued with torches we could set to give a red light, which doesn't bother the birds either. So we could go inside the broch, and the more intrepid of us could climb the staircase - the original iron age stairs - between the walls to the top. I didn't do that, but I enjoyed sitting in the dark of the broch, listening to the birds chirring and watching the red lights coming and going in the walls. Eventually, though, we were all waiting outside:
waiting for the birds who were out in search of food to return to the nest. We had been congratulating ourselves on the fine night, after a rainy early evening, but this had its downside: the birds stayed out later. Eventually, though, we began to see them flittering around the tower, and then finding their way back to their own individual cavity. By now, around one o' clock, it was pretty dark, and sometimes all I could see of a little black bird was its white rump, as it squeezed itself into a tiny gap between the stones - and then it would beat its wings to hold itself in position, and I could make out the shape of the bird.
I admit that I found the walk out to the broch tricky: I'm a slow walker, especially on uneven ground (there's a reason why we stopped walking with the Ramblers). And the walk back, in the nearest to actual darkness we saw in all our time in Shetland, was worse: the little torches were brilliant at illuminating the ground for the next step, less so for finding the track three steps ahead. The Mousa boat staff were endlessly patient and helpful, and I hope I've conveyed how much the trip was absolutely worth it. And before two o' clock we were back on the boat, and the sky was pink with the promise of morning:
So when it came to getting up to watch the sun rise on the solstice itself, I admit I wasn't enthusiastic: hadn't we done that already?
durham_rambler and D. got up, and I looked out of the window at the solid cloud cover and declined to join them - and the sun, of course, did not visibly rise. As I write this, though, it is setting into the sea in a blaze of red and gold.
