Sandstone cliffs, cropped grass and wind off open water
Nineteen hours of daylight and no trees: reserve a six night island walking week in Shetland
From $1,940 per person, two sharing a double room, six nights in the first three weeks of June. The spread is wide. The sun is up around nineteen hours at that latitude, which fixes the clock and nothing else: the same six nights can be still and enormous or a grey lid at fifty metres. Both weeks are printed below at the same figure.
Reserve one of these weeksSend the form whenever it suits: it never shuts. Someone here replies inside one working day, and no charge arises at this end.
One week, written out twice
One set of dates, one set of rooms, the same guides and the same $1,940. The variable is the place itself, which answers to nobody here. Both readings appear below because both are real.
At its best
You walk the cliff edge on grass cropped short by sheep, three hundred feet of red sandstone under your boots, and the ledges below are stacked with nesting birds making a noise you feel in your chest. Guillemots on the flat rock, kittiwakes on the small ledges, puffins in burrows behind you in the turf, and you sit down and wait rather than chase them. Another day is a low island of broch and stone dykes, another is peat moor and a loch with a hut on it for shelter. At half past ten at night the room is bright enough to read in without the lamp, and the sky over the water goes orange and stays that way for two hours. Wool, fish, oatcakes, and an early crossing that is somebody else's booking.
At its worst
Same six nights, same room, same $1,940. June this far north can settle into haar, a wet sea fog that comes off the water and sits. At fifty metres of visibility the cliff walk is still walkable and completely pointless: you hear the colony, you smell it, and you see nothing below the first ledge. Wind shuts the small boat days, and the crossing to the outer island is cancelled by the operator, not by you. Rain arrives horizontally. What still stands: nothing at all is lost to darkness, because the sun is up nineteen hours whatever the sky is doing; the brochs, the wool sheds, the small museums and the food are indoors or close to it; and walking a bare treeless island in weather is nearer the point of the place than most people expect.
About a hundred islands sitting at sixty degrees north, sixteen of them lived on, none of them wooded. Wind and salt do that: what grows is grass, heather, thrift and crops inside walls, and a planted sycamore behind a house counts as an event. The rock changes as you move, old red sandstone in the south, gneiss and serpentine further north, and it decides what the cliffs look like. Nowhere is more than three miles from open water. People have been here a very long time, so the ground carries brochs, wheelhouses, walled fields, croft ruins, wartime concrete and dry stone dykes running across moor that has nothing left to keep in. Six nights is enough to walk three or four islands properly and no more than that.
How the six days are built
Tall narrow view of a sheer red sandstone sea cliff with layered ledges above white water
Four guided walking days, eight to fourteen miles each, on grass, heather and cliff edge, with no scrambling and no rope anywhere. One of those days needs a small passenger boat run by a local operator to reach an outer island, and that is the day that goes first when the wind gets up; the guide carries an alternative on the main island and will use it without ceremony. One day is left open. Cliff walking here is exposed and unfenced, which is the whole point and also the reason nobody walks it in a gale. Evenings are early, food is fish, lamb and oats, and the room is still bright at eleven, so people sleep badly for two nights and then adjust.
What $1,940 buys and what it does not
Six nights, two sharing a double room, in a guest house with one night in a converted croft; breakfast daily and three evening meals; four guided walking days with a guide who lives there; road transport on those days; the inter island vehicle crossings the plan needs; and the outer island boat fee on the day it runs. Outside the figure: reaching the islands at all, which is your own booking, because this office arranges no flights and no sailings and holds a contract with no carrier. Also outside: lunches, three dinners, drinks, boots and waterproofs, and whatever the boat operator does or does not return on a cancelled day. No insurance is sold here. Whichever firm runs the week invoices under its own name, and this end is settled with once you are back.
Nights
6
From
$1,940 per person, two sharing
When it runs
the first three weeks of June
Spread between the two versions
Wide
What the figure holds
Rooms for the nights stated, the guided days set out on this page, admissions belonging to those days, and whatever the running company charges for its own part.
What it leaves out
Reaching the country and leaving it again, any meal not listed above, anything personal, and anything agreed later.
Who invoices you
The company that runs the week, in its own name.
Asked before anybody commits
Will the cliffs be full of birds in the week I book?
June is the nesting season, which is why the week sits where it does, but nobody can tell you what a given ledge will hold on a given morning, and this office keeps no figure on it and will not invent one. Colonies move, seasons run early or late, and fog can hide a full cliff completely. That is the wide half of this spread.
What happens if the boat day is cancelled?
The operator makes that call on the morning, on wind and sea state, and it is final. You get the walking alternative the guide carries for exactly this, and whether the boat fee comes back depends on that operator's own terms, which you agree with them directly. This office cannot overrule the decision and does not pretend that it can.
Is cover for the week something you can arrange?
No. This office sells no insurance, arranges none and gives no advice on it, and the same goes for visas, passports, vaccination, law and medicine. Those sit outside what a booking office should be answering. Take the cover you think you need from somebody qualified to sell it, and read what it says about cancelled boat days before you go.
Finish the sentence and a week gets reserved
Whatever the hour, what you send lands here and is read by a person, who replies inside one working day. Sending it binds you to nothing, and no sum is ever taken at this end.
