To Shetland and Lerwick

Our Shetland adventure begins

Looking through my many photos, I realized I didn’t really intend to document our trips — I just took pictures of the things and people I wanted to remember. Sometimes we visited a place without my taking any pictures at all. But because we were lucky enough to visit many of these places many times, I built up a pretty good collection of photos. I hope you are enjoying these pictures and the stories that go with them!

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Before leaving Orkney for Shetland on the night ferry, we usually managed to fit in another session at The Reel. Below are a couple of pictures of sessions there. Jennifer Wrigley enjoyed joining in the music. She’s on the right in both pictures. The one on the right also includes my son Neil on mandolin, the one time he was able to join us.

The other pictures are of the huge Northlink ferry. You can see the gigantic Viking painted on the side, pointing the way. This boat is actually one we took a few times, named Hjaltland, which is the old Norse name for Shetland. Finally, there’s a photo of my little bedroom on the boat. It had everything including a bathroom, storage, a reading light, a tea kettle.

The food was good on the boat, and they let us have a nice breakfast in the restaurant/cafeteria before leaving in the morning. Below is the view of the harbor from the boat, and below that, part of the waterfront in Lerwick, the capital city, where we were based. Some of those buildings at the edge of the water had secret doors where 17th and 18th century smugglers would store illegal goods in tunnels to avoid customs taxes and other restrictions.

One time, one of our first sights off the boat was a group of Shetland ponies being warmed up for a competition, as you can see on the right.

Many of the inland streets in Lerwick are built on hills, and some actually have stairways. Below on the left is a small street off the Market Cross, right by the main harbor. As the road curves left, straight ahead is the sign for The Lounge, which is where Shetland musicians have enjoyed sessions for many decades. The photo at right shows a session there that I played in.

The picture below that is one of those panorama shots. It starts on the left side with the same street The Lounge is on; the street in the middle is the main commercial street of the town, paved with flagstones, and full of shops, cafes and the like. To the right, in front of the market cross, is the High Level Music Centre, which sells instruments, CDs, Shetland and other music books. It’s a great shop, owned by the mother of a very fine Shetland fiddler, Maggie Adamson, who has a great command of traditional Shetland as well as classical music.

A couple years ago, we had to stop and take a picture of Jimmy Perez’s house, from the TV show Shetland. A woman passing by spotted us viewing the sight and without even saying hello, just said, “The new series starts tomorrow!” Having been there, lots of the locations they filmed are familiar to me, but I don’t believe there’s as much crime on Shetland as is required by the plot of the show!

When you come into the ferry terminal or the airport, you see the logo shown below — “Shetland: Pride of Place,” with a landscape scene, and a large drawing of the scroll of a violin. Shetland fiddle music has been central in the culture, for listening and for dancing. Dances in village halls involve many dancers, but one traditional scenario for dances was to squeeze three couples into a kitchen, with one fiddler playing the melodies and another playing rhythmic drones. The couples would dance in place showing off their steps to each other, then they’d take off reeling in a figure eight, couples round couples, in the tight space of the kitchen before once again doing steps in place to each other.

Many Shetlanders spend a few months working on the North Sea oil rigs, and Shetland has earned a fair bit of income from that oil. Orkney also earns some of the oil money, though the two apparently have very different views of how to make use of it. Orkney tends to save it for a rainy day, while Shetland has spent a lot of it on community projects.

For example, Shetland gives all its schoolchildren a violin and free instruction. We got to see the results of this by attending some of the Shetland Showcases, in which some really good fiddlers showed off their tunes to an enthusiastic audience. Several professional players performed as well, and the audience was treated to craft tables in the back, and tea and treats in the lobby.

The middle picture below is of one of the groups at a Shetland Showcase, and the photo at the right shows some kids performing at a major festival, which at the time was called Fiddle Frenzy, but is now called Folk Frenzy. We’ll talk more about that soon.

One of the uses of the oil money was the building of a fantastic cultural center called Mareel, side by side with the Shetland Museum and Archives. “Mareel” is an old Shetland word describing the phosphorescence of summer waves at night.

Mareel contains a versatile auditorium often used for concerts and to show movies. It can have either banked theater seating, or be set up as a flat space with tables. The building also has a bookstore, cafe, and a broadcasting studio, conferences and classrooms, and a recording studio. Next door is a fantastic museum of Shetland history and culture, with archives of books and rare recordings, and a nice restaurant as well.

Below is the outside of Mareel, and at right a shot of some fiddlers climbing the stairs, with giant movie posters lining the way.

Out back of Mareel is Hay’s Dock, as seen below. The black boat there is a sixareen, so named because it could handle six people. Historically, this type of boat is famous for serving fishermen escaping the draconian demands of Scottish lairds who moved in and sought to control the people’s resources, including claiming ownership of many miles of the sea, and all the fish caught there. In response, the fishermen took to their sixereens and rowed as far as forty miles out to sea, beyond the reach of the lairds, to fill their boat with fish. Then they would put up the mast, set the sail, and bring the heavy load back home to use and sell for themselves.

The sixareen out back of Mareel is called the Vaila Mae and has been used to teach people how to use it. I’ve seen a crew rowing out in the harbor without the mast. Below in the center, you can see that they’ve put up the mast, and at right, they’ve set the sail.

There’s a famous tune by Tom Anderson called “Da Sixereen,” which I’ve recorded for you here. We’ll talk more about Tom next time.

And below is a video of folks sailing a sixareen, with music from the great Shetland band, Haltadans, led by fiddler Maurice Henderson, who we’ll be talking more about in the next few weeks, as we had the opportunity several times to meet with him and hear his music and stories. He’s one of Shetland’s experts on the trowies, the little people, possibly from personal experience!