Dramatic scenery, heavenly hotels and cute wildlife – the Shetland Isles are holiday gold
Shetland Wednesday 9.00pm BBC1
Ed Grenby - 1 September 2022
Idris Elba? Jennifer Saunders? Robert Pattinson? The week I’m visiting the Shetland Isles, there’s only one topic of conversation: who will replace Douglas Henshall in the next series of Shetland. (Those three names had a significant share of the vote in a local radio poll.)
That maybe gives you an idea of how thoroughly the BBC’s crime drama is woven into the fabric of island life after seven series. Everyone here has a Shetland story to tell, and the show’s been responsible for a huge surge in visitor numbers to these northernmost of the British Isles – partly fuelled by the forensically detailed guide to the show’s locations to be found on the tourist board’s excellent website – shetland.org/visit.
Truth is, it feels like you couldn’t throw a Fair Isle jumper round here without hitting a croft, cottage or cliff where someone in the series was murdered, discovered, confronted or (more rarely) married. In fact it was the last – scene of the wedding of Evie Watt and John Henderson in series two – that was my very favourite location. Quiet even by Shetland standards, Papil, Bridge End and the West Isle are part of a set of fishing villages, each smaller than the last, as you head away from the middle of Shetland’s main landmass down its western fringe.
At the very end of the road is Minn Beach (which also featured heavily in season six), a gorgeous, sickle-shaped sweep of sand that wouldn’t look out of place in the Seychelles (if it weren’t for the Balamory cottages and the Narnia-look hills in the distance). Even more arresting is the double-beach at St Ninian’s Isle, just up the main island’s west coast. Technically a tombolo, where refracted waves carve out a sandy causeway, it’s a 500m stretch of pristine powder and pure ozonic air used in the show for drug smuggling and in reality for making you feel glad to be alive. I do take a dip, but – even in late July – I feel like I’m playing “chicken” with frostbite, so it’s a brief one. Shetland is more walking than swimming territory, and the right-to-roam enshrined in law here means pretty much every gate is an invitation.
My most memorable stroll was among the heather-clad hills and hard-faced cliffs around the Hams of Muckle Roe, with views over a neonblue patch of the Atlantic and across to a lovely, lonely lighthouse. (It was partly the post-walk fish and chips that made it, though. At Frankie’s in Brae, I had haddock so meltingly soft inside its crispy batter carapace that it seemed to have come off the boat only hours ago. (With 170 fishing vessels in Shetland, landing a sixth of the UK’s entire catch, it almost certainly did.) Up the road, just when you think you must have gone past it because how on earth could there be a hotel out here, is the St Magnus Bay Hotel, as homely as your mum’s house. It’s handy for the Hillswick Wildlife Sanctuary, but I head straight off the following morning for the ferry to Toft, the next island north in the archipelago. I’m waved cheerily away when I try to pay my £6.50 fare, and am met on the other side by Josh, chief otter spotter for Shetland Nature.
With his expertise, and by approaching from downwind, it’s amazing how close we get to Tarka and pals along Toft’s coast, and I can’t take my eyes off them: by turns they’re cute, cool, playful, powerful, predatory, sleepy, greedy, vicious, smart and dopey. Watching them guzzle a fish, Gollum-like, is great; watching them fight is thrilling; watching them nuzzle and play with each other for a few seconds is life-changing. Another day, another island – this time Fair Isle (ancestral home of Shetland’s Jimmy Perez), where the plane lands on a tiny airstrip from which a fire engine has to sound its siren to clear the sheep off the runway. There’s no tourist infrastructure as such, so I just walk down the track from the runway and out into the fields. It’s a surreally beautiful place of picturesque pastures, dramatic crags, ends-ofthe-earth lighthouses, panoramic seascapes and weird perpendicular peaks: if you didn’t know better, you’d think it had been CGI’d.
Which leaves me just a day in Lerwick, Shetland’s capital. Though not as pretty as some of the smaller villages, its busy docks and quays have a lovely bustle and a romance about them. And Shetland Seabird Tours’ puffin and gannet trip is spectacular. There are dozens of Shetland locations in town, but it’s Perez’s house, the Lodberrie, that steals the show. This stolid old greystone, with its steps down into the water, was once a humble fish-merchant’s yard, but now – with the whole of the Shetland Isles on its doorstep, little Bain’s Beach beside it, and its newfound celebrity status – it’s one of Scotland’s most desirable homes. Whoever inherits it (and Pattinson is surely a long shot) is a lucky devil. ED GRENBY
Idris Elba? Jennifer Saunders? Robert Pattinson? The week I’m visiting the Shetland Isles, there’s only one topic of conversation: who will replace Douglas Henshall in the next series of Shetland. (Those three names had a significant share of the vote in a local radio poll.)
That maybe gives you an idea of how thoroughly the BBC’s crime drama is woven into the fabric of island life after seven series. Everyone here has a Shetland story to tell, and the show’s been responsible for a huge surge in visitor numbers to these northernmost of the British Isles – partly fuelled by the forensically detailed guide to the show’s locations to be found on the tourist board’s excellent website – shetland.org/visit.
Truth is, it feels like you couldn’t throw a Fair Isle jumper round here without hitting a croft, cottage or cliff where someone in the series was murdered, discovered, confronted or (more rarely) married. In fact it was the last – scene of the wedding of Evie Watt and John Henderson in series two – that was my very favourite location. Quiet even by Shetland standards, Papil, Bridge End and the West Isle are part of a set of fishing villages, each smaller than the last, as you head away from the middle of Shetland’s main landmass down its western fringe.
At the very end of the road is Minn Beach (which also featured heavily in season six), a gorgeous, sickle-shaped sweep of sand that wouldn’t look out of place in the Seychelles (if it weren’t for the Balamory cottages and the Narnia-look hills in the distance). Even more arresting is the double-beach at St Ninian’s Isle, just up the main island’s west coast. Technically a tombolo, where refracted waves carve out a sandy causeway, it’s a 500m stretch of pristine powder and pure ozonic air used in the show for drug smuggling and in reality for making you feel glad to be alive. I do take a dip, but – even in late July – I feel like I’m playing “chicken” with frostbite, so it’s a brief one. Shetland is more walking than swimming territory, and the right-to-roam enshrined in law here means pretty much every gate is an invitation.
My most memorable stroll was among the heather-clad hills and hard-faced cliffs around the Hams of Muckle Roe, with views over a neonblue patch of the Atlantic and across to a lovely, lonely lighthouse. (It was partly the post-walk fish and chips that made it, though. At Frankie’s in Brae, I had haddock so meltingly soft inside its crispy batter carapace that it seemed to have come off the boat only hours ago. (With 170 fishing vessels in Shetland, landing a sixth of the UK’s entire catch, it almost certainly did.) Up the road, just when you think you must have gone past it because how on earth could there be a hotel out here, is the St Magnus Bay Hotel, as homely as your mum’s house. It’s handy for the Hillswick Wildlife Sanctuary, but I head straight off the following morning for the ferry to Toft, the next island north in the archipelago. I’m waved cheerily away when I try to pay my £6.50 fare, and am met on the other side by Josh, chief otter spotter for Shetland Nature.
With his expertise, and by approaching from downwind, it’s amazing how close we get to Tarka and pals along Toft’s coast, and I can’t take my eyes off them: by turns they’re cute, cool, playful, powerful, predatory, sleepy, greedy, vicious, smart and dopey. Watching them guzzle a fish, Gollum-like, is great; watching them fight is thrilling; watching them nuzzle and play with each other for a few seconds is life-changing. Another day, another island – this time Fair Isle (ancestral home of Shetland’s Jimmy Perez), where the plane lands on a tiny airstrip from which a fire engine has to sound its siren to clear the sheep off the runway. There’s no tourist infrastructure as such, so I just walk down the track from the runway and out into the fields. It’s a surreally beautiful place of picturesque pastures, dramatic crags, ends-ofthe-earth lighthouses, panoramic seascapes and weird perpendicular peaks: if you didn’t know better, you’d think it had been CGI’d.
Which leaves me just a day in Lerwick, Shetland’s capital. Though not as pretty as some of the smaller villages, its busy docks and quays have a lovely bustle and a romance about them. And Shetland Seabird Tours’ puffin and gannet trip is spectacular. There are dozens of Shetland locations in town, but it’s Perez’s house, the Lodberrie, that steals the show. This stolid old greystone, with its steps down into the water, was once a humble fish-merchant’s yard, but now – with the whole of the Shetland Isles on its doorstep, little Bain’s Beach beside it, and its newfound celebrity status – it’s one of Scotland’s most desirable homes. Whoever inherits it (and Pattinson is surely a long shot) is a lucky devil. ED GRENBY