Other sights of the Mainland are Scalloway, on the west coast, the ancient capital, where the tyrant Earl Patrick built a castle; Fitful Head, with its grand view from the end of the southern promontory; the Broch of Mousa, most perfect example of such structures, on an islet off the east coast of this promontory; and Papa Stour, an island on the other side, riddled with creeks and caves, one of which MacCulloch dubbed the finest in Britain. Then the main island is pitted with countless lochs, “one for every day in the year,” in which, as in the inlets, fishing can still be had free.
To speak of the other islands, Yell, Fetlar, Whalsay and their satellites, would be merely repetition of similar characteristics as summed up in Black’s Guide, their interior usually a dull stretch of hills, bogs, and pools, but the coast, especially on the west side, a wonderful show: “Mural precipices over 1000 feet high, the abode of myriads of sea-fowl of all descriptions; solitary islets, feeding on their flat green tops flocks of timid lambs; isolated ‘stacks,’ cleaving the skies; gloomy ‘hellyers,’ within whose sunless shades the tide ebbs and flows; here a gravelly beach piled high with heaps of cod and tusk and ling in process of curing; there a narrow gio, with a herd of seals sunning themselves on its tangle-covered rocks,—such are the varieties of the Shetland seascape and landscape.”
The northernmost island is Unst, which Mr. Tudor pronounces at once the most grandly picturesque of them all, “bar Foula,” and also the most thriving, for along with some remarkable mineral rarities, it has oases of cultivation that have earned it the title, “Garden of the Shetlands.” One of the stone circles here is believed to mark the ancient meeting-place of the Shetland Thing, or popular assembly, before its removal to Tingwall on the Mainland. In modern days Unst has been famed as residence of the Edmonstons, that family of naturalists, and as sojourn of Biot, the French savant, while carrying out his delicate astronomical measurements. In Biot’s account of this task, he praises the warm hearts and peaceful lives of the Shetland families, so close knit in kindliness, but for which he could not imagine what kept them in their poor and ungenial country.
Off the north end of Unst, seven hundred miles from the Bishop’s Rock Lighthouse of Scilly, England’s most southerly point, our Ultima Thule is the isolated crag of Muckle Flugga. Here towers a lighthouse, the building of which, half a century ago, was itself a perilous achievement, as with so many more of
Those ever-burning fires that smile
O’er night’s bleak ocean many a mile,
To welcome Albion’s truant child
From Indian shore or western wild.
Lighthouses have indeed been a boon to the navigators of these stormy seas, as steamers to their inhabitants, though of one pious islander it is recorded how his first acquaintance with such a fiery craft fulfilled his vision of the Day of Judgment.