Unst

The Process of Getting There

Reaching Unst requires effort, which is either a deterrent or a promise depending on how you travel. From Lerwick on the Shetland Mainland, you drive north through the length of the Mainland, take a short ferry to Yell, cross Yell by road, take another short ferry to Unst, and arrive. Each ferry crossing is fifteen minutes or less. The total journey is around three hours. By the time you reach Unst’s main settlement of Baltasound, you feel you’ve earned the latitude.

The ferry crossings are calming rather than dramatic — sheltered sounds, grey water, a few gannets overhead. On the Yell crossing I watched a harbour seal follow the wake of the boat for several minutes, apparently enjoying itself. The Unst ferry lands at Belmont and the road north from there passes through a landscape that changes register almost immediately: the vegetation gets lower, the serpentinite rock starts appearing in greenish exposures in the hillside, and the sky gets bigger in a way that’s hard to explain except that there’s simply more of it.

Serpentinite and Strange Ground

Unst sits on an unusual band of serpentinite — a greenish metamorphic rock rich in magnesium that creates a specific soil chemistry hostile to most plants. The result is an upland habitat, particularly in the area around Keen of Hamar, that looks like nothing else in Britain: sparse, stony, the vegetation reduced to prostrate mats of unusual plants. Arctic sandwort and Norwegian sandwort grow here, along with Edmondston’s chickweed, which exists nowhere else on earth. It was first described by Thomas Edmondston, who was born on Unst in 1825, grew up collecting these odd plants, and was shot dead on a scientific expedition to Peru at the age of twenty.

I walked the Keen of Hamar nature reserve on a clear afternoon. The ground felt uncertain underfoot, crumbly and loose where the serpentinite weathers. The view from the top was more moon than moorland, but moon with a sea horizon in three directions.

Bobby’s Bus Shelter

This requires brief mention because to not mention it is a kind of dishonesty. At Baltasound, someone long ago decorated a bus shelter with furniture, a television, and various domestic objects, and subsequent residents have maintained and elaborated on the tradition. When I arrived it contained a sofa, a bookcase, a lamp, a noticeboard, and a framed photograph of the Queen. The bus that uses the stop serves a handful of children per day at most. The shelter attracts dedicated visitors who have traveled from mainland Britain specifically to see it. I sat on the sofa for five minutes and read part of someone’s left copy of a crossword magazine. This felt like the correct thing to do.

Saxa Vord and the North

The hill of Saxa Vord at the northern end of Unst reaches 285 meters and can be climbed on a clear day for a view that includes Fair Isle to the south and, on exceptional days, the Faroe Islands to the northwest. Near its base, the Saxa Vord resort has repurposed a former RAF early warning station into accommodation, and on site there is the Valhalla Brewery, which claims to be Europe’s most northerly brewery. I drank a pint of their ale in the late afternoon at 60 degrees 50 minutes north. It tasted like beer, which was appropriate.

When to go: May through August for the Hermaness seabird season and the best chance of clear weather. The island is accessible year-round but the ferry timetable reduces in winter — check crossing times before committing to an itinerary.