Holiday 2010 - Part 6

Another day, another ferry or two, another cup of tea at the Wind Dog Cafe on Yell. Another unimaginatively-titled blog. Today is the day to visit the isle of Unst.

First port of call is the Keen of Hamar National Nature Reserve. The directions to which might as well read "just turn right at the bus stop, you can't miss it. That's the bus stop, not the reserve". More on the bus stop later. Keen of Hamar is, at first glance, a "barren, bleak and lifeless rocky desert" and that's a quote from the Scottish Natural Heritage information leaflet! But this lunar landscape is home to some of the rarest flora in the UK, a veritable botanical gold mine. The stony ground, a debris field of serpentine rock, has a fragile carpet of tiny plants which have evolved to survive in this harsh environment where they don't have to compete with more normal flowers and grasses.

The star of the show is Edmondston's Chickweed (Shetland Mouse-ear) which is endemic to Unst and discovered by the 12-year-old Thomas Edmondston in 1837. Take a moment to contemplate that... this tiny flower grows nowhere else in the world, except on this small, desolate, north-facing slope. We were nervous about even walking around the reserve, in case we inadvertently brought about its irretrievable extinction. Other treasures included Northern Rock Cress, Norwegian Sandwort, Mountain Everlasting, Frog Orchid and Moonwort.

Edmondston's Chickweed  (flower approx 20mm across)

After tip-toeing around in the biting wind for a while, we retreated to safer ground. Well, safer for our feet, but not necessarily our sanity, as we returned to the Unst Bus Shelter. Think I'm resorting to my usual hyperbole and blowing the whole thing out of proportion? OK, how many bus shelters do you know with their own website? As it was late June 2010, the theme gave a nod to the World Cup, though I couldn't possibly divulge which team was being favoured.

This is the closest our lass has ever come to smiling at football

After a most pleasant lunch in the Northern Lights cafe in Haroldswick, we headed for another NNR, this time the seabird colony at Hermaness. From the car park, we trekked across the moor to the west side of the island and the cliffs that support 100,000 pairs of breeding birds in the summer months. These include 12,000 Gannets, 25,000 Puffins, 14,000 Fulmars, 20,000 Guillemots, as well as numerous Razorbills, Kittiwakes, Bonxies, Shags, and Arctic Skuas. I'm afraid we can't vouch for any of this, for although we could certainly hear them and most definitely smell them, due to low cloud, we couldn't actually see them. At the risk of repeating myself, "Shag!" Occasionally, a gannet would emerge out of the gloom, balancing on the wind to hang in front of us before disappearing into the fog once more.

Gannets in the mist

Bl**dy glad I brought the Factor 30 sun cream!

From one bit of clifftop, thankfully below the cloud base, we could just make out the lighthouse on Muckle Flugga, at the very northern tip of Great Britain. Retracing our steps across the moor, our lass spotted some Bonxie chicks, not far from the footpath. We felt fortunate not to be dive bombed by their parents, as Great Skuas are fiercely protective of their young. They seemed more preoccupied with repelling sheep from the area around the nest than with us. To be honest, my estimation of sheep as stupid creatures had to be reconsidered, as they stubbornly refused to be threatened by pairs of screaming skuas zooming in at sheep head height. And in inverse proportion, my estimation of Bonxies as fierce aerial predators went down due to their inability to scare off a woolly lawnmower.

Following a picnic tea by the shore at Baltasound, we had a wander along the coast. Here we were brought up sharply by what we found. A stark reminder that despite the idyllic scenery and fantastic community spirit that exists in these islands, unless at all times we are on our guard to the dangers, there is always space for that insidious and destructive force known as peer pressure...

I had to apply for a licence from the Guild of Grammatical Pedants for special dispensation to work in that typo.

Holiday 2010 - Part 1

This year, for our summer holiday (or our second spring, as we like to call it), we thought we'd have a change from the usual trip to Orkney. Well, you can have too much of all that cloud, wind and rain, can't you?

Exactly.

With that in mind, we went to Shetland instead. Nestled at 60 degrees North and sharing its latitude with the likes of Oslo, Helsinki, St Petersburg and Anchorage, what better place to go to escape all that sweltering English weather?

For the first few days, we were based in the capital, Lerwick, and immediately met several of the locals, one of whom even turned up for breakfast.

Herring Gull

Arctic Tern

We had arrived in the middle of the Hamefarin 2010 celebrations, a festival for descendants of emigrants from centuries past, returning to Shetland to meet relatives and catch up with what's been happening on the "Auld Rock". Inevitably, for a land so steeped in Norse culture, there's a great deal of Viking regalia on display. I'd not seen so much sheepskin, leather and gleaming metalwork since the day a chapter of Hell's Angels gate-crashed an episode of One Man and His Dog.

We were travelling in the company of Wrong Len and his Scottish companion, Cameron Binns. They couldn't wait to travel down to the RSPB reserve at Sumburgh Head and take the obligatory shot of a Puffin. We took the option of parking at Jarlshof and walking along the coast to the lighthouse, a decision which paid instant dividends when a family of Wrens emerged on a dry stone wall beside us. The accent of a singing Shetland Wren is a joy to behold. Anyway, without further ado, let's get the chuffing Puffin bit out of the way, with the usual mitigation about poor light, strong winds and a rubbish photographer.

Puffin

We did pop in to Jarlshof on the way back and I was pleasantly surprised to hear a Celtus CD being played in the gift shop. Not particularly Neolithic, I'll admit, but a band sadly missed by the staff at Tense Towers.

Continuing our exploration of the southern part of Shetland, the next day we ventured to St Ninian's Isle, which is not strictly an island as it is connected to the mainland by a geographical feature called a tombolo. This is a sand bar formed by the tides flowing around the north and south of the isle, producing a beach with two shores.

Tombolo from St Ninian's Isle

Over a picnic lunch, watching the to-ings and fro-ings of various sea birds, our lass asked a question that had obviously been troubling her for some time, "What do Fulmars actually do?" Now admittedly, they're either soaring playfully on the wind or just idly sat about, so when do they raise a family? Our bird book states that they live to be fifty, so perhaps they have got loads of time to loaf around.

At times during the holiday, it felt like all the Wheatears in the world were on Shetland, and St Ninian's Isle was no exception. We also managed to approach a pair of Bonxies (Great Skuas) who obviously weren't nesting there, as we did not come under aerial assault. If it were not for the fact that this one was sat right at the edge of a particularly narrow bit of cliff and that the wind was gustier than a gusty thing, I might even have been able to get a bit closer.

Bonxie

We now set off for our second location, where we would be based for the remainder of the holiday. Another island, Muckle Roe, this time connected to the Shetland mainland by the more prosaic method of a bridge. And also a  very different prospect to the bustle of Lerwick, a B+B tucked away at the end of the road on the south side of the island.

Perfick!