Landing in Paradise
Welcome to the Shetland Islands
“Than the gladness of the morning,
The glory of the day."
- Bliss CarmanFinally I find somewhere that definitely passes the Hercualeum Test: Old Scatness.
Six quid for two and a half thousand years of history. History which, fifty years ago, was entirely unknown to the world and only began to be properly understood during a dozen summers of archaeological excavation between 1995 and 2006.
Expansion of the airport at Sumburgh, due to the ever-burgeoning oil and gas industry of the mid-1970s, led to the re-routing of a road and this was built through what was believed to be a natural mound. When work began, it was discovered that the mound was anything but natural and that it covered a piece of Shetland Island history which had been hidden for centuries. The workmen discovered what was soon confirmed to be an Iron Age broch dating to the middle of the first millennium BC.
A broch is a round tower, usually with a hollow outer wall which contains a staircase to climb to the higher levels of the tower. There might be over a hundred broch sites in Shetland alone and perhaps five times as many across Scotland but you won’t find one anywhere else in the world. The windowless iron age constructions would have resembled miniature power station cooling towers. The tallest reached heights of maybe fifty feet or so and this was done without mortar, they are built in the way that drystone walls are built.
The broch at Old Scatness was dated to between 200 and 400 BC, the dating was based on a grain of barley and a sheep bone. Now, I don’t know about you, but the fact that we can now date something from a bit of leftover stew is as incredible as the fact that our Iron Age forebears could build fifty-foot towers without mortar. There is a lot of academic discussion – which is another term for guessing – about the purpose of a broch.
Some people don’t see them as defensive structures but the broch here at Old Scatness had a four metre deep, seven metre wide ditch around it and may have had ramparts six metres high, so that’s not exactly what I’d call welcoming. A village later grew up around the broch and was inhabited throughout the Iron Age and later by Picts and then Vikings. The last phase of settlement was probably a croft in the seventeenth century.
Today there’s an amazing amount left to see: there’s a reconstructed roundhouse and the remains of another and then there is the broch itself; this is massive. The thick walls still stand quite high, taller than me in places, and later additions have divided the interior into a whole series of rooms and chambers. Because there are at least three distinct phases of building and the broch is surrounded by other buildings added over the centuries, it can be quite confusing until you walk on the floor our ancestors walked on and stand by the hearth where they warmed themselves and cooked that lamb stew which helped to date the whole place. Then it all makes sense because you and the first person who stood by the fire here are just two humans, you may be separated by twenty-four centuries but you’re stood in the same place. You want shelter, you want warmth, you want a hot meal, you want companionship and you want safety. While the whole world has changed, nothing has changed at all.
On the day I visited in May, I could see why you’d choose to build your broch here. It is right on the coast by a tiny curving beach. A view across the deep blue waters of the Bay of Quendale to the mound of Garths Ness looking like a humpback whale has surfaced a mile and a half away. To your left, just offshore are the tiny islands of Lady’s Holm and Little Holm. To your right, the scatter of white, single-storey houses that form the settlements of Toab and Scholland. Behind them the low-lying Ward Hill on the summit of which are the grassy outlines of long-deserted houses. The grass at your feet, sprinkled with dandelions, leads to a rocky border on the fine sand of the beach. If I had to live in the Iron Age, I wouldn’t mind a broch right here.
Next to the broch is Betty Mouats Böd, a croft which has now been converted into a böd, a place to camp, like a bothy. This one seems quite luxurious, though, with three reception rooms, two bedrooms, a hot water heater, shower and solid fuel fire. It got its name because it was, unsurprisingly, the home of Betty Mouat. Betty was born in 1825 in Levenwick about seven miles to the north of here. Her father, who was a whaler, was lost at sea when she was six months old and Betty and her mother moved to Scatness where her mother had been raised.
Betty Mouat hand spun the wool of the sheep who grazed here, descendants of the one whose bone dated the broch. She knitted shawls and sold them to make some extra money. One day in 1886, the sixty-one-year-old Betty set off for Lerwick to sell some shawls. She had not ventured this far, all of twenty-three miles, for fourteen years. Nowadays Lerwick is a thirty-minute drive but in 1886 the roads were poor and there was no overland mode of transport for Betty other than by foot. For that reason, she took a boat, the sailing smack Columbine.
Three miles into the journey the boat encountered heavy seas, the main boom broke and the skipper and mate tried to effect a repair but the movement of the ship caused both men to be flung overboard. The mate managed to climb back on board and he immediately set off in a smaller boat with the only other crewmember, to save the captain. They couldn’t find him and so turned to head back to the Columbine but discovered that they could not catch it, so they headed for shore to raise the alarm. This left Betty alone on the storm-tossed smack and after two days of searching it was assumed that she and the ship had been lost.
Eight days later, on 7th February 1886, the Columbine was washed ashore on a beach at Lepsøy, near to Ålesund, in Norway at the place now known as Columbinebukta: Columbine Bay. Betty had survived on a few ship’s biscuits and a bottle of milk and was alive and well. She was returned to Scotland and made it back to Lerwick in late March, now something of a celebrity. People started the Victorian equivalent of a GoFundMe page and money was raised to help Betty. The donations included twenty quid from the lady who had given her name to the Victorian age, Betty received a letter from the same Queen, too. Betty outlived her monarch by a fair stretch and passed away in 1918 at the age of 93.
Because Shetland is so beautiful, I’m going to stay here a while. Next week I’ll take the trip from here to Lerwick with my paid subscribers and then on 15th December I’ll be back to share the joys of Lerwick with everybody.