Something about Shetland

I chose this picture, from a wealth of alternatives, because it shows everything that's interesting about Shetland, which is a land of juxtapositions and contrasts. In the foreground, you have a housing estate, for the all the world looking like something from the Faroes or Iceland, with beyond the houses a leisure marina filled with very expensive looking boats. Further back, you have Scalloway Castle, built by slave labour for Earl Stewart in the early 1600s, but right next to it the buildings associated with industrial scale fish landings. Further back again, you have the houses and shops of Scalloway town, and in the distance even again another housing estate on the hill overlooking Scalloway. Over to the top left, you have a hillside with modern day crofting houses.

And meanwhile, you have the sea - never more than five kilometres away, wherever you are.

Later on, we drove into Scalloway and saw quite a few Norwegian flags - plenty more than we saw Saltires. Interesting.

We've been most favourably impressed with our first full day on Shetland, and meanwhile the weather continues to be better than it was in Edinburgh for the early part of July. So that's pretty good, isn't it?

Check out Mr Alf's blip of a tirrick in action, contrasting my immobile one of yesterday.