Ann Cleeves' Shetland

by Ann Cleeves

  A small loch near Vementry.

  SHETLAND

  Ann Cleeves

  MACMILLAN

  Eshaness Lighthouse and cliff.

  Contents

  Introduction

  Winter

  Spring

  Summer

  Autumn

  Conclusion

  Map of Shetland

  AUTHOR ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  PICTURE CREDITS

  Fair Isle South Light.

  Ann at the Lodeberrie in Lerwick, the location of Jimmy Perez’s house in the books and television show.

  It’s exactly forty years since I first went to Shetland. I’d dropped out of university and found myself, lost and a little miserable, in London. I was working as a childcare officer for Camden Social Services, a job that I enjoyed, but which involved very long hours. I’d grown up in the country, and in London I had few friends and little support. Then, after a chance meeting in a pub, I was offered a job as assistant cook in the bird observatory in Fair Isle. I wasn’t even quite sure where Fair Isle was, but I was young, it sounded like an adventure and, more importantly, it represented escape from the city. I arrived on the most remote inhabited island in Shetland, and the UK, in the wake of gale-force winds, very seasick and feeling like an impostor – after all, I knew nothing about birds and I couldn’t cook!

  But it was spring, the cliffs were raucous with seabirds and pink with thrift, and from the moment I stepped ashore I was enchanted. I loved the island and its people, the routine of crofting and bird migration, the stories of shipwrecks and storms. I met my husband there – he came as a visiting birdwatcher and then returned the following year to camp, and to work on a friend’s croft in return for food and home-brew. We left as a couple and we’re still together. Since then Shetland has been my place of sanctuary and inspiration. It’s where I go to spend time with friends, to blow away the anxieties of everyday life and to write. I’ve set six novels there, and I’m already planning two more, and the BBC’s TV adaptation of my work is airing across the world. Another series is in production.

  Fair Isle children.

  My first visit to Shetland was a time of dramatic change in the islands. Oil was being extracted from the North Sea for the first time, and the big terminal at Sullom Voe in North Mainland was under construction. On my rare visits to Shetland Mainland, Lerwick – the islands’ biggest settlement – had the feel of a gold-rush town. There was an influx of people who saw the chance of making money; I bumped into suited executives, contractors and oilmen on their way to the rigs.

  Shetland has a history of people arriving from outside, though, and I think it managed the time of transition well. It still welcomes visitors with grace and hospitality, whether they’re tourists desperate to experience the fire festival of Up Helly Aa or a BBC film crew. I enjoy writing about the islands just because they are dynamic, changing and energetic. Don’t come to Shetland imagining a Viking theme park, a place fixed in the past. History is important here, but the community looks to the future, to developing sustainable energy and becoming as self-sufficient in food as it can manage. Artists and craftspeople use the traditions of spinning and knitting to create new textile designs. Young musicians play old tunes and write their own music. The islands are bleak and beautiful and very alive.

  The new observatory was completed in 2010.

  Fair Isle North Light.

  Muckle Flugga Lighthouse.

  Shetland is an archipelago of more than a hundred islands that lie at the most northerly point of the United Kingdom. It’s over ninety miles long from Out Stack in the north to Fair Isle in the south. The islands are long and thin and perhaps the shape – a little like the hilt of a sword – provides an explanation of its name in Norse, ‘Hjaltland’. Most of the islands are uninhabited, and approximately one-third of the population of about 22,000 lives in Lerwick. Shetland extends from 59º 51’ north to 61º north, the same line of latitude as Anchorage in Alaska and the southern tip of Greenland. Lerwick is in fact closer to the Arctic Circle than to London. Yet while the winters are often wet and windy, Atlantic currents carrying warm water that originated in the Caribbean mean that they are relatively mild. It was the contrast between the dark days of winter and the light nights of summer that prompted me to use the changing seasons as a background to my first four books.

  Mavis Grind.

  The magic of Shetland’s landscape lies in its coastline – it has more than 1,500 miles of shoreline, and wherever one stands the view is of the water. It’s impossible to be more than three miles from the sea. At Mavis Grind in Northmavine the island is so narrow that it would be possible to throw a rock from the North Sea to the Atlantic – if you have a strong arm. There are dramatic sea cliffs at Eshaness in Northmavine, at Hermaness in Unst, in Noss and, most spectacularly, in the island of Foula, where a small population, and a primary school and teacher, still survives.

  Foula.

  Spiggie Loch.

  Eider ducks on mussel rope buoys.

  Spiggie Beach.

  There are voes, flooded valleys that were scooped out by glaciers and now cut into the land. These provide space for mussel and salmon farms – the mussel ropes look like strings of jet beads, with each bead as a buoy marking the rope below; and the salmon are farmed in cages. And there are lochs, big ones like Spiggie, separated from the sea only by a line of dunes, and small nameless pools in the hills. It has been estimated that there are 1,600 lochs and pools in the islands. Light is splintered by the water and the weather is reflected in it, so the outlook changes according to the sunlight and cloud and the time of day.

  Cut peats drying.

  There is a rich variety of habitats throughout the archipelago. The high granite areas of North Mainland and Unst are known as ‘fellfield’ and are home to arctic or dwarf forms of plant. Though once it was heavily forested with birch scrub and rowan, there are now few trees in Shetland; a few native species remain in isolated pockets not reached by sheep or rabbits, and attempts have been made to plant conifer plantations. The bare hills create a landscape of long horizons and big skies. About 50 per cent of Shetland is covered in peat and it is still cut for fuel. Intricately arranged stacks are built to allow the peat to dry. Agriculture is based around sheep – there are more than 100,000 of them in the islands. Though some of the lowland is cultivated, the pattern of small crofts with strip fields, more common when I first arrived in the 1970s, has largely disappeared.

  Farmhouse and ruined crofts on Foula.

  The inhabited islands are connected by bridge (like that to Trondra, both Burra Isles and Muckle Roe) or by regular ferry – it’s possible to commute to Lerwick from Bressay, Whalsay or even Yell. The more remote islands of Foula and Fair Isle are reached by a mailboat that can take passengers, but not their cars. These crossings aren’t always comfortable or even possible, and many islanders and visitors prefer to use the small planes operated by Shetland Island Council from Tingwall airport. On a clear day it’s a spectacular way to come into the more remote islands. Visitors arrive into Shetland by plane from Glasgow, Inverness, Edinburgh or Aberdeen, into Sumburgh airport to the south of Mainland, or by overnight ferry from Aberdeen into Lerwick.

  Burra Bridge.

  Tingwall looking towards Trondra Bridge.

  Mousa Broch.

  Clickimin Broch.

  Of course the first visitors to Shetland came by boat and the journey must have been long and arduous. It is possible they arrived before 5000 BC, but the oldest remaining structures – chambered cairns, houses and field walls left by Neolithic farmers – date from 3250 BC. There is a sense of history everywhere in the islands, a feeling that every standing stone and ruined house can tell a story or holds a secr
et – inspiration for any crime writer. During the Iron Age, from around 500 BC, the distinctive brochs were built. Brochs are drystone towers, with outer and inner walls. It’s still possible to climb the stone steps between the walls in the amazingly well-preserved broch on the island of Mousa, and another remains in Clickimin Loch, close to Lerwick town centre.

  By the sixth century AD the Picts had arrived in Shetland, and spectacular evidence of their presence was found in the St Ninian’s Isle treasure, which was discovered beneath the floor of a chapel in a larchwood box, along with the jawbone of a porpoise. There were twenty-eight silver objects, and these included drinking bowls, sword fittings and brooches. Replicas of these beautifully carved items can be seen in the museum in Lerwick’s Hay’s Dock.

  Shetland is best known for its Viking heritage. Though we have no accurate date of their first arrival in the islands, the Vikings probably didn’t settle until the ninth century AD. We do know that the existing language was replaced very quickly by Old Norse, and that most of Shetland’s place names derive from that time. It’s clear that the Vikings didn’t just come to attack and pillage, but that they stayed and developed sophisticated communities. Just like more recent inhabitants, they were farmers and fishermen. They kept cows, sheep and ponies and grew barley. The tradition of spinning and weaving also began at that time, iron was smelted and water mills were used to grind grain.

  Shetland belonged to Denmark until 1469. Denmark was a major power and ruled Norway at the time, so the Norwegian connection to the islands dates back many centuries. When the Danish king couldn’t afford a dowry for his daughter, Shetland was handed to Scotland. For many years afterwards it suffered the hardships endured by other rural communities ruled by lairds, whose motivation was more often financial gain than the well-being of their tenants. The croft clearances that had a major impact on the Scottish landscape occurred later in Shetland than they did on the mainland, and some of the island lairds were native Shetlanders. Crofters paid their rent in kind – fish, butter, meat and knitwear – and were then forced to buy other goods either through the landowner or from powerful merchants. In the nineteenth century poverty in Shetland led to mass emigration, mostly to Canada and New Zealand.

  St Ninian’s Isle Treasure.

  Ruined Viking chapel on St Ninian’s Isle where the treasure was found by a schoolboy.

  Gutting fish in the 1910s at Cumliewick.

  The Hanseatic trading booth at Symbister, right.

  Cutting up a whale carcass at Olna whaling station in the 1920s.

  Fishing became more important, and from the fifteenth until the eighteenth centuries fish was exported through the Hanseatic League, a trading partnership based around the North Sea, and mostly in German towns like Bremen and Hamburg. It is still possible to see one of the Hanseatic trading booths at the pier in Symbister in the island of Whalsay, and I used this setting and these historical details in the novel Red Bones. From the seventeenth century Arctic whaling ships called into Shetland for supplies and repairs and, because of their skill as seamen, Shetlanders were recruited to join the crews. They were still serving on whalers in the southern oceans until the middle of the twentieth century, when the practice died out as the industry became uneconomic and attitudes to whaling changed. In the late nineteenth century the herring fishery grew and drew in another wave of outside workers; the catch was processed by women and preserved in barrels of salt. There is still a substantial fleet of pelagic trawlers in the islands today, and many of these large and well-equipped ships continue to be based in Whalsay. Fishing is the most lucrative industry in Shetland, despite the wealth created by North Sea oil.

  Pilot boat at Lerwick.

  The monument to the ‘Shetland Bus’ in Scalloway.

  Shetland’s link with Scandinavia has been cemented in more recent times by the close relationship between the islands and Norway during the Second World War. Norway was occupied by the Germans, and an operation based in the islands and supervised by British military intelligence helped resistance fighters return to their home country. Small fishing boats, built solely for use in inland waters and fjords, crossed the treacherous waters of the North Sea carrying men, weapons and money. This movement was known as the ‘Shetland Bus’ and is celebrated by a monument in the small town of Scalloway and in the museum there. In the summer there is now a scheduled direct flight between Sumburgh and Bergen.

  In this book I hope to take you on a journey through a year in the life of the islands. You’ll meet its people, celebrate its festivals and see how the flora and fauna of Shetland change with the seasons. By the end I hope you’ll understand why the place means so much to me.

  Fitful Head with Fair Isle in the distance.

  Shetland pony in November.

  Winter Comes In by Jack Renwick (1924–2010)

  Grey dawn brakkin ower troubled watters,

  Grey dawn breaking over troubled waters,

  Da Soond laek a burn, wi da rip o da tide;

  The Sound like a burn, with the rip of the tide;

  Da Mull, black an grim, i da first o da daylicht

  The Mull, black and grim, in the first of the daylight

  Wi da sea brakkin white on his nortmost side.

  With the sea breaking white on its northern side.

  Yowes kruggin closs i da lee o a daek-end,

  Ewes sheltering together by the end of a dyke,

  Creepin frae a chill at bites ta da bon.

  Creeping from a chill that bites to the bone.

  Solan an scarf aa wirkin inshore

  Gannet and shag all working inshore

  A sign at da best o da wedder is dön.

  A sign that the best of the weather has been.

  Hail sheetin doon wi a nort wind ahint it,

  Hail sheeting down with a north wind behind it,

  Blottin oot laand an sea frae da scene.

  Blotting out land and sea from the scene.

  An iron coortin closin ower aa thing:

  An iron curtain closing over everything:

  Winter has come ta da islands again.

  Winter has come to the islands again.

  My job in the bird observatory was seasonal, so I’ve never lived in Shetland for a winter, but I have visited often, and that time of year is very special for me. I enjoy the drama of the dark days, and the strong winds that can make it hard to stand up and can rock a stationary car so that the passengers feel it’s about to tip over. One of the best nights I’ve had in the islands was in the middle of a storm that brought down power lines and took the Mainland back to the time of small domestic generators, lamps and candles. We were staying with friends and were invited to their neighbours’ house, and at the impromptu party food and wine appeared as if by magic, someone brought out a fiddle and we didn’t fight our way home through the gale until the early hours of the morning.

  An island winter is a good backdrop for a story about loneliness and murder. I’m working now on a midwinter story, and the grey days of rain and cloud provide just the atmosphere I want. As I write I can sense the claustrophobia of unseen horizons and the feeling of being trapped – not just by circumstance, but by the persistent gloom outside. Raven Black, the first of the island novels, changed my career; readers and reviewers were attracted by the backdrop of a wintry Shetland and it’s since been translated into thirty languages. The book is set between New Year’s Eve and Up Helly Aa, the Viking fire festival that takes place in Lerwick on the last Tuesday of January.

  Raven in the snow.

  Inspiration for the book came on a crazy visit north in late December. My husband is a passionate birdwatcher, and a very rare bird had turned up in Lerwick. I hadn’t given him a very exciting Christmas gift, so I decided that a day-trip to the islands might be a good belated present. Now it seems a crazy thing to have done: there was a long drive to Aberdeen and an overnight fourteen-hour trip on the ferry, before we arrived into Lerwick well before dawn. Unusually for Shetland, it was still and
very cold. There was snow on the ground and even the shore was covered in blue ice. When the sun did come up, it was a huge orange ball in a clear sky. We saw ravens, very black against the snow, with their distinctive wedge-shaped tails and harsh calls. And because I’m a crime writer, I thought if there was blood too, it would remind the reader of a scene from a fairy tale, where the princess has skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood and hair as black as ebony. Very mythic somehow. That’s how the novel was started. I began planning it on the ferry south, though at that point I thought it might be a short story. It seemed impertinent for an outsider to write a Shetland novel, and it was only the encouragement of the islands’ literature officer that persuaded me to continue.

  Snow at St Ninian’s Isle in April.