Shetland Island – Holiday Travel Deals

The Shetland Islands are inset islands. They lie so far north of the Scottish mainland that on nearly all United Kingdom maps they are shown only in a box in the corner. This has subtly affected our conception of them. They are much, much further away then most people suppose. They are much more foreign places, much harder, older and more distinct. They are closer to the Arctic Circle than they are to London, as near to Bergen as to Aberdeen, as far north as Anchorage in Alaska, or Leningrad. There are more than a hundred Shetland islands, 17 of them inhabited, and they are strung out in a long and skinny archipelago, like a distinctly un-coral reef dividing the northern oceans – at a spot half-way down, so the geographers say, you can throw a stone from the North Sea to the Atlantic.

This remote and arcane nature is the compelling interest of the Shetland Islands, which are different in kind from Orkney, the Hebrides and the other British islands of the north: but it is compounded by another immense abstraction – the impact of the international oil industry, which has fallen upon these innocent outposts with all its fateful implications of change and disillusion. Like an invasion from another planet, this gigantic force has affected every aspect of life in the islands, and has made of them a disturbing allegory of our times, where profound dilemmas of human aspiration are enacted, floodlit upon a windy stage.

When you are taking Shetland flights – the quandaries of Shetland suggest themselves the moment you fly into Sumburgh airport, at the southern tip of the main islands group. It looks exactly like a map down there. Below the wing of your old Viscount rises Sumburgh Head, fringed in surf and crowned with a lighthouse just like an Ordnance Survey symbol: and there are sheep and Shetland ponies grazing the contour lines, and scattered crofts, and small boats beached in coves; and jagged at the water’s edge, as though in the ornamental script they reserve for Non-Roman Antiquities, is the ruined 17th-century house of Jarlshof, which was named by Walter Scott himself, and which stands on a site riddled with the tunnels and chambers of the haziest island ancients.