Sumburgh Head
One of the places we wanted to go to was Sumburgh Head, on the southern tip of the main island. Our Lonely Planet guide recommended it for spectacular coastal views and good wildlife watching. Aside from birds, I was definitely hoping to see more seals and also hoping to see some whales, which can be seen in the waters around Shetland. There are a fair number of places in the Shetlands where it's easier to get there by vehicle, but we have tried to avoid using a car in the UK (and we will go back to Canada successfully never using a vehicle here!), so we took a bus from Lerwick to the nearest spot we could get to, the Sumburgh Head Hotel, about a 50-minute ride, and then walked about 40 minutes up a slow incline to get to the lighthouse. You might think this is a long journey, and perhaps it is, but living here for 3 years without a vehicle, we have increased our active living activities, so a walk like this is no longer as daunting as it might have seemed before we moved here. Along the way were beautiful scenes of sheep grazing on low, verdant hills; Shetland ponies (because I mean, if you're in the Shetlands, you should see the ponies from there, right?) in paddocks, birds of various sorts that I had never seen before, and little farms and ruins in the fields.
When we got up to the lighthouse, there was even a straggler couple of puffins roaming around, seeming to have forgotten to take off with their friends for their winter life on the sea. People from the area, including my husband's colleague, were apologising that the puffins were no longer there and that we wouldn't get to see them, but given our trip to Skomer Island last year just for this purpose, we weren't as disheartened as they probably thought we'd be. But it's just neat to know that there are so many of these same beautiful birds and beyond in the Shetlands as well. Anyway, the lighthouse was really interesting. There's a small fee to get in, but it was really worth it because we learned about this lighthouse's importance not only to general seafarers, but also again for the war effort. Apparently the south part of the island was the first point of contact due to sailing routes at the time, and so it played a hugely strategic role in the war effort that region. Many of us (or is it just me?) aren't usually told much about Hitler's designs on Scandinavia, and the Germans were very active trying to invade Norway. In fact, I was able to get access to some of my grandpa's military info and found out he'd been stationed on a Norwegian island called Spitzbergen under Operation Gauntlet! Anyway, the lighthouse ended up housing a radar station, and 2 of the buildings from that operation are still standing, one of which has been refurbished to appear as it likely did at that time, and you can pop in to take a look at it. Another point of interest about lighthouses, which you can read a bit more about in my photo album linked at the end of this post, is that the grandfather of well-known author Robert Louis Stevenson, is the person who founded the National Lighthouse Board and designed, along with other family members, most of the NLB's lights. If you've read any of Robert Louis's novels, you notice a very nautical theme, and given his family's heavy involvement with lighthouses, it's a small wonder that maritime life features so prominently in his novels.
There is also a foghorn there, which apparently was once used in a storm so bad that it sounded for something like 18 hours straight, to the annoyance of everyone within earshot, but mostly to the lighthouse keeper, for whom the sound for that length of time must have been horrendous--and I don't think they had nice earplugs at at the time. It was so loud that it could be heard in Fair Isle, another island of the Shetlands, which is visible from the lighthouse in distance. It hasn't been used since the late 80s apparently, and nowadays, foghorns are no longer necessary because GPS systems provide sufficient information in poor visibility that boats can navigate successfully without the use of these older technologies.
On our way back to the bus stop to return to Lerwick, we took a different route. We'd noticed people walking in the fields on our walk up and thought they were trespassing, but it turns out you are allowed to go in, and they even have little staircases built over the stone fences so you can take a coastal path between the hotel and the lighthouse. So we had a great walk back to the bus stop, not just for the views, but we also didn't have to worry about vehicles passing by on the narrow road with no shoulder or sidewalk. I didn't get to see any cetaceans or seals, but the different birds and sheep and views were lovely, and we went past some ruins here and there that we wished we knew more about. Like were they houses? Barns? Who knows. But the ruins are still there who knows how many centuries later. And though we didn't pay to go in, by the hotel, there is also the entrance to Jarlshof, a prehistoric Norse settlement around 4000 years ago whose ruins and broch are also still present.
If you're ever visiting Shetland, this is definitely high on our recommendation list of things to see and do. See another album of photos here.
(Side note: I didn't get a photo of them because I was in the bus and moving too fast, but I thought I saw something that looked like cotton growing in a field. Turns out, it was bog cotton! I came across this information by chance when I was looking up one of the flowers I did get a photo of. You can read about it on this person's blog to see a photo and find out more.)