News from Nowhere

Despite the bleak weather, I'm daydreaming about the north, not the south: putting together a trip to Orkney in the summer. It's three years since we were last there, and then only a brief stopover on our way home from Fair Isle. Just as shocking, it's two years since I posted a photo from Fair Isle's North Light with a promise of context in "the next post". The day we visited the light was, by one definition, the first day of spring, since it was the day the first cruise liner of the year called in - and was greeted by a craft fair at the hall, mostly of beautiful but expensive knitwear. It was greeted, too, by a brief flurry of snow, but the day cleared and by the afternoon it was pleasant walking weather again.

My notes from that last day on Fair Isle are a series of disjointed jottings:

Everyone is friendly, solicitous, interested in how you travelled to the island: did you fly? "Oh, you came on the boat..."



There are two churches on the island - strictly, one church (the white Kirk of Scotland church) and one (Methodist) chapel, but a single congregation which alternates between the two.

A line of dialogue: "Oh, you said 'rabbits'. I thought you said 'raptors'."

Bill very kindly picked us up from the South Light, where we were staying, drove us up to the North Light and gave us a guided tour of the lighthouse. We opted to walk back, through sunshine and the odd snow shower. At a steep valley punctuated by ruined mills we ran into M and J, being guided round some of the island's sites by a resident archaeologist, and together we visited the remnants of the Heinkel which crashed there in 1941.

And the next day we took the Good Shepherd back to Mainland.

The excuse for our trip to Fair Isle was to celebrate the publication of Ann Cleeves' book Blue Lightning and the completion of her quartet of novels about Shetland. This week Blue Lightning came out in paperback. That makes me feel a long time must have passed: not quite as long as you'd think, since the hardback was actually published in February - but even the hardiest of us didn't contemplate a trip to Fair Isle in February!

The launch party was only one of the social events arranged for the visitors to the island. On Saturday evening we (all the guests and our various hosts) were invited to the Hall for a slide show - local photographer Dave Wheeler had put together a collection of photographs of Fair Isle in the 1970s, when Ann had first gone there.

The pictures were interesting enough in themselves, but even more interesting was looking at them in the company of islanders of all ages. The 1970s seem quite recent to me, but it's over a generation ago; we were looking at old family photographs with the family. The adults pointed out people and events they recognised, but even the children could identify the crofts by name. Afterwards, I commented on this to Ann: it's not 'Jimmy's house' but 'Busta' or 'Kennaby'. She pointed out that far from houses being identified by their owners, people would be identified by where they lived: one of the island's several Jimmys would be identified as 'Busta Jimmy'.

One set of photographs felt older, as if they'd come from a much more distant past. Nowadays most of the island is grazed by sheep, but in the 70s more of it was used for crops, and every last patch of grazing had to be used. That includes the four hectares of grassland on Sheep Rock:



- the rocky mound on the right of the photo, connected to the island only by a narrow isthmus, much too precipitous for the sheep to be driven across. So they were taken out to the rock in spring, and brought home again for the winter, by boat, and hoist onto the rock with ropes (here's one of Dave's photos). Truly, people are amazing.

Sunday's party for Blue Lightning was an even grander affair: everyone on the island was at the Hall (including a group of ladies who had booked into their Bed & Breakfast because they were keen knitters, and were a little embarrassed to find themselves at a party: but their host had told them they had to come, there'd be nowhere else to eat tonight. There was plenty to eat at the party: heaps of smoked salmon and mussels, great vats of salad, bannocks spread with reestit mutton, and there was music from Chris Stout and others...

Here's Dave Wheeler's photoset of the evening; and here's David Robinson's description of the party (published in The Scotsman last weekend, which is why it's about time I wrote this post).

Both nights, we left the party somewhere between ten and eleven, and walked home to the South Light in the last of the twilight, the white cottages luminous on the dark hillsides.

How long is the coast of Fair Isle? Well, how long would you like it to be? Dave, our host at the South Light, told us it was 40 miles long, maybe even 50, but to achieve that you'd need to walk, not just round every inlet but round every boulder. Keeping, as we did, a safe yard or so from the cliff edge, it's probably no more than 28 miles, which is still plenty of inlets and headlands and unexpected changes of direction and new views (as you can see from the map).

On Saturday we set off clockwise from the South Light, a steep climb up Malcolm's Head, on turf strewn with limpet shells. This is puffin territory, we were told, and the trick is to go up there just before sunset and catch them posing against the setting sun. Later we also heard a more practical explanation: at this time of year, the puffins have laid their eggs, and the males spend the day out at sea feeding while the female stays in the burrow and looks after the egg; then, shortly before sunset, the males start to gather on the water below the burrows, and at a certain point, they all fly up to the nests, and the females fly out to sea to feed. I wish I'd seen that. But we did see three puffins, from quite close, and lots of rabbits (many of them black). At the summit we came to the ruined lookout tower. Beyond it we paused to eat our sandwiches by a geo - a long narrow inlet - and watched the swallows swooping back and forth along it.



On Sunday we set off along the coast, tracking every little inlet, venturing down the steps to the little harbour, crunching through an even thicher scattering of limpet shells, loitering to watch the seals, taking every opportunity to sit in the sun, seeing how the sea pinks on the rocks were almost - almost - in flower... We didn't get far in the morning, and had agreed that this time we would return to the South Light for lunch.

In the afternoon durham_rambler rambled off again, with a guided walk, while I stayed home and bathed, read, blogged, prepared for the evening's party.

The Northlink ferry from Aberdeen to Shetland is a very civilised way to travel. We returned to the terminal, transferred our big suitcase to the trolley, then boarded, found our cabin and relaxed until dinner time, when we dined in the restaurant. We were woken early next morning by the announcement that we were approaching Lerwick, but there was no hurry to vacate the cabin, and we could breakfast in leisure before we left the ferry.

We were due out of Lerwick to Fair Isle on the Good Shepherd in the afternoon, but Ann told us that once the Good Shepherd arrived, we could put our luggage on board. The four of us headed for Hays Wharf, where the Good Shepherd docks - which just happens to be outside the Shetland Museum.

It was a damp and chilly morning, and the museum took pity on us, first letting us in to wait in the reception area, and stack our luggage in a corner out of the way, then tipping us off that the galleries were open and we could look round. We hadn't necessarily intended to spend the morning at the museum, but it is a wonderful museum, and we found enough to detain us and keep us entertained with only the shortest excursion to town until lunch time.

Somehow we all ended up in the museum cafe, and somehow we ran into more of our party there. We told Ann how kind the museum staff had been to us, and that the lady who let us in had lived on Fair Isle for several years. It's typical of the island, I now realise, that this was not just a stray interesting fact, but something to be pounced on and worried until the marrow had been extracted from it in the form of an identification: "Oh, I know, she'll be..."

Eventually - after warnings all round to take seasickness pills - it was time to board the Good Shepherd.



I had expected a modern ferry, like those that link Shetland Mainland to the North Isles: but the Good Shepherd's first purpose is to carry cargo. Anything that is imported to Fair Isle must either be flown in, or travel on the Good Shepherd (we shared our passage with a boat). If it's too big to fit on the Good Shepherd, you have a problem - and this is why the renovation of the Bird Observatory has been delayed. My initial reaction was to blame the builders, but on this occasion, it seems, that's not fair. The new building is a modular construction, the modules are too large to come in on the Shepherd, and plans to float them in on special rafts weren't put into action early enough to benefit from the summer weather. The island gossip (Fair Isle is a great place for gossip) says that the modules were built in Orkney by a firm who thought that this meant they knew all there was to be known about islands, and learned otherwise.

So passengers are not the raison d'être of the Fair Isle ferry service. The crew treated us with gentle solicitude, as if we were a particularly sensitive cargo, and settled us in the cabin or on deck, as we chose. It was a lively crossing: the boat rolled impressively, especially once we had cleared Sumburgh Head and were on the open sea. The windows veered from showing nothing but sky to showing notng but sea, and back. You read descriptions of storms with mountainous waves towering above the ship - this was nothing like that. Rounded billows barely disturbed the surface of the sea. But the boat reacted energetically enough, and the voyage lasted for four and a half hours (I hadn't quite taken on how much longer it took as a result of sailing from Lerwick rather than the usual Grutness at he southern tip of Shetland).

We were glad to arrive, and grateful Deryk, the warden from the Bird Observatory, who gave durham_rambler and me a lift down to our accomodation at the South Light (and then went home and blogged about it). We didn't stay up to watch the election results: I'm not sure we'd have had the stamina for it, even if it had been an option, but in fact the electricity at the South Light goes off at 11.30 (the generator stops for the night) so we went to bed with a clear conscience.

So we sped north on the train through green fields and pearly grey skies, with our books and our coffee and our wifi. Splashes of yellow were fields of rape just coming into bloom - except for two blocks of acid yellow which weren't rape at all, but daffodils. For a while before we reached Aberdeen we were travelling through grey mist, but by the time we reached the grey city it had lifted to cloud.

We left our big suitcase at the Northlink terminal, and set off to explore the city. We ate our sandwiches down by the Dee, where we watched the crews of two orange boats practicing rescuing one another. Then we made our way into town through streets where the only businesses were Chinese restaurants.

Aberdeen is grey, and tries to look austere, but keeps breaking out in decorative flourishes; the architecture has the pseudo-medieval flamboyance of the Flemish wool towns, but in monochrome. It's large scale, but as the major streets are filled with anytown chain stores, Aberdeen is trying to promote the smaller, more characterful wynds - not entirely convincingly.

We had coffee in a busy Starbucks, where we were entertained by a small girl in pale blond bunches and icecream pink clothes, hiding and peeping out from behind us very seriously, but beaming with pleasure at being noticed.

And there was just time before closing for a visit to Provost Skene's House: duck under a twentieth century glass and concrete block and you find the oldest house in Aberdeen, with a series of rooms furnished in different periods, a fabulous seventeenth century painted ceiling and a small costume gallery (best dress, linen, arty, 1930s).

On the last zebra crossing before the Northlink terminal, we heard a voice behind us: "It's durham_rambler and shewhomust!" It was M. and J., fellow participants in the reat Fair Isle expedition - so now the party had really begun.