Armchair Travels: Shetland - The Landscape
Far to the north, where the North Sea gives way to the open Atlantic, a hundred islands rise green and treeless from the water, ringed by cliffs and combed by an endless wind. This is Shetland, and few places on earth wear their weather, their history, and their wool so proudly.
In celebration of Shetland's famous Wool Week, over the coming weeks we are sailing north together to explore the archipelago that has shaped some of the most treasured traditions in all of knitting. We begin where any good adventure ought to, with the land itself. Long before the sheep, the yarn, or the first row of colorwork, there is the place, and Shetland is a place that gets right into your bones.
Where the Map Nearly Runs Out
Find Scotland on a map, then keep going north. Past the Highlands, past Orkney, out into the open sea until the mainland is only a memory, and there, at sixty degrees north, sits Shetland. It is an archipelago of scattered islands, just sixteen of them inhabited, home to just over twenty-three thousand people and a great many more sheep.
The largest island is known, with characteristic understatement, simply as the Mainland; Lerwick, the lively little capital on its eastern shore, lies closer to Bergen in Norway than it does to Edinburgh. You are never more than three miles from the sea here, and the sea is written into the shape of the land itself, cutting deep inlets called voes into the coastline and scattering the islands like stepping stones toward the Arctic.
You might expect somewhere this far north to be locked in ice. On the map, Shetland shares its line of latitude with southern Greenland and the top of Alaska. In practice, the North Atlantic Current, the great warm conveyor of the Gulf Stream, wraps the islands in surprisingly gentle air, so the winters arrive wet and wild rather than frozen, and the summers turn cool, green, and impossibly long in the evenings.
Follow the islands to their northern limit and you reach Unst, the northernmost inhabited land in all of Britain, where the lighthouse at Muckle Flugga keeps watch over the very last of the map. Turn south instead and you find Fair Isle, a green comma of land adrift halfway to Orkney, home to only around fifty people. Out to the west lies Foula, one of the most remote inhabited islands in the country. Hold on to those three names. Each has given the knitting world something remarkable, and we will come back to them before this journey is through.
The Simmer Dim
Life this far north is governed by light, and by its absence. Shetlanders have a name for the midsummer spell when the sun refuses to properly set: the simmer dim. For a few weeks around the solstice, the islands bask in something close to nineteen hours of daylight, and even at midnight the sun merely dips beneath the horizon before climbing straight back up, leaving the sky a lingering, milky glow that belongs to neither day nor night. It stays bright enough to read outdoors well past midnight, bright enough to knit by, and generations of Shetlanders have done exactly that. Winter, naturally, keeps the ledger balanced. When the dark months close in and daylight shrinks to a scant few hours, the fireside and the wool basket come into their own, and the great winter fire festivals blaze all the brighter against the black.
A Norse Inheritance
Those fire festivals are the most visible thread of a heritage that runs deep, and runs Norse. Vikings arrived on these shores around the ninth century and stayed for more than six hundred years; Shetland did not pass to Scotland until 1469, when the islands changed hands as part of a royal dowry. That Scandinavian ancestry lives on in the old Norse name for the islands, Hjaltland; in the hundreds of Old Norse words still folded into the everyday Shetland dialect; and in the council's own motto, borrowed from an Icelandic saga: Með lögum skal land byggja, "by law shall the land be built up." The same inheritance sings through Shetland's celebrated fiddle music and its poetry.
Every winter, communities the length of the islands honor that lineage at Up Helly Aa, a fire festival whose largest gathering fills the streets of Lerwick on the last Tuesday of January. Squads of costumed guizers, led by a Guizer Jarl in full Viking dress, march by torchlight down to the harbor, where they set a replica longship gloriously ablaze. It is a spectacle to stir anyone's blood, and it is the sound of a place that has never once forgotten where it came from.
Where the Flocks Outnumber the Folk
For all its drama, Shetland is not a soft landscape. The wind blows almost without pause off the Atlantic, salt-laden and relentless, and it has shaped the islands to its liking. The wind is so constant that trees never took hold, and in their place lies open moorland cloaked in heather, dark peat bogs, towering sea cliffs, and green pasture that tumbles down to the water's edge. The growing season is brief, the soil thin and stony, and yet this hard-won ground has sustained crofters, the islands' small-scale farmers, for countless generations.
What flourishes here, magnificently, is sheep. Shetland's most recent agricultural census counted close to two hundred and ninety thousand of them scattered across the islands, which comes out at roughly a dozen sheep for every single person, and in one recent year alone those flocks produced more than three hundred thousand kilograms of wool. Here is the heart of everything we are setting out to explore. The very wind and salt that keep the trees away have made ideal pasture for a small, hardy, remarkably fine-fleeced sheep, and the people who built their lives among those flocks turned raw fleece into some of the most celebrated knitting on earth.
Cast On Your Own Piece of Shetland
So there is our first stop: a scattering of green islands at the top of the world, lit by the midnight sun in summer and by torchlight in winter, carved by the sea and the wind and six centuries of Norse history, and grazed by more sheep than you could hope to count. It is the stage on which everything still to come will play out. Next time we will step into the one week of the year when the whole knitting world turns its gaze north, as we explore Shetland Wool Week and all that it celebrates. Until then, you are warmly invited to wander through the wool that all of this produces over on our Shetland collection page, and to start dreaming up an island-inspired project of your own. The kettle is on, and the journey has only just begun.
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