The Shetland Islands

More Awesome Scottish Islands

In one of my first posts I wrote about how much I enjoyed the neolithic stone hedges, villages, and history of the Orkney Islands.  Then in a later post about the whiskey distilleries I toured, I retold my enjoyment at visiting the Talisker Distillery on the Isle of Skye.  Today I am adding one more post about awesome Scottish Islands, the island of Mainland of the Shetland Islands.

Exploring some ancient ruins of a Broch on the Sheltand Islands.

The Shetland Islands are the most remote of the Scottish Isles.  Most travel to them is via ferry, a twelve hour and over one hundred mile journey from the Scottish mainland.  We made our way to the Shetlands via a British Isles cruise, and while we only made port at one of the more than one hundred islands.  It was one of my more favorite ports of the one month cruise.

Posing on the causeway that connects Clickimin Broch to the mainland.

Upon arriving at the port on Mainland, we picked up a local free map at a tourist stand.  The town while quaint and adorable as all be, filled with little shops and cafes in stone terraces, was small.  We are more the adventuresome and less the shopping type.  We noticed on the map an ancient stone structure was apparently located on a an island in the middle of a lake about a mile away.   So we made that our destination and headed off on what I can only describe as a lovely thirty minute stroll to the site.  Every house, building, field, and street was well kept.  With lush greenery filling every open space, and winding walking paths making travel by foot exceedingly enjoyable, a lovely stroll truly does seem the perfect description.

Inside the exterior wall of Clickimin Broch a maze of walkways hint of the rooms a structures that once existed there.

It wasn't long before we made it to Clickimin Broch.  At the time I did not know what a "broch" was, and there wasn't much infrastructure at the site to explain the controversy of a broch's purpose.  Indeed the only infrastructure added at the site was a causeway allowing access to the broch from the mainland and a sign by the road.  What I have learned since returning home is that nobody truly knows what a broch is.  It could have been a fort, a stately home, a storehouse, or a farm house.  It could also have been a multipurpose facility encompassing two or more of the previously mentioned uses.  

Walking around the interior of the broch means climbing over and under stones built into the  walls of the structure.

What archeologists do know is that their construction predates writing in Scotland (pre 7th century B.C.) which is why we don't know their uses.  Also there are a lot of them, mostly clustered on the Scottish islands and the very tip of the mainland.  They are all circular structures and are usually positioned in a defensive position, such as on the precipice of a cliff, on the ocean shore, or as the one we visited, on an island in a lake.

We made it to Clickimin Broch!

The broch was free to enter and we spent a good hour crawling and climbing around the site, exploring all the nooks and crannies of the surprisingly complex structure.  We pretty much had it all to ourselves, expect for the couple leaving when we entered, who snapped the photo of us together on the approach causeway.  Once inside none of the tunnels or crawl-ways were blocked off, leaving us with only our fear of the deep dark unknown (no lights either) to hold us back, which it did not.

I loved this sign on Mainland of the Shetland Islands.

Content with our exploration for the day, we headed back to the port a different way than we came, with an eye out for one other thing the shetland islands are famous for: ponies.  As we walked along I spotted some, I think.  I am not a horse person, so I used other reasoning to ascertain if the animals were what I think they were, shetland ponies.  They were on the Shetland Islands where traditionally other horse breeds do not fare well in the harsh climate.  They were small, with their shoulders standing much lower than mine.  Also they had that big pot belly look of a pony.  While most photos of sheltand ponies show tiny animals with super fury bodies, there is actually a wide variety of looks a shetland pony can have, including a shoulder height of up to forty-six inches.  Either way we felt confident we had completed our task in finding a shetland pony and moved on.

Some possible shetland ponies we saw on our walk back to the ship.

We walked around the town a bit more before returning to the ship.  It was still small and quaint with not a lot to offer us, so we did not explore it for more than an hour.  For a day when we didn't plan any activities, our time at the Shetland Islands turned out to be an all around pleasant time.

The town where our ship called to port on Mainland of the Shetland Islands is comprised mainly of stone buildings.