The island contains about a hundred inhabitants, who live chiefly by fishing and knitting. They are both skilful and industrious. During the winter months, the men, as well as the women, knit caps, gloves, and waistcoats; and for dyeing the wool, procure a variety of colours from native herbs and lichens.
True happiness, springing as it ever does from above and from within, may have its peaceful abode here among those lonely islanders quite apart from the noise and bustle of what is called the great world, although the stranger sailing past is apt to think such places “remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow.”[[2]]
Ere long we could distinguish the bold headland of Sumburgh, which is the southern extremity of Shetland; and a little to the north-west of it, by the aid of an opera-glass, Fitful Head,[[3]] rendered famous by Sir Walter Scott as the dwelling place of Norna, in “The Pirate.”
Last summer I visited this the most northern group of British islands, famed alike for skilful seamen, fearless fishermen, and fairy-fingered knitters; for its hardy ponies, and for that soft, warm, fleecy wool which is peculiar to its sheep.
Gazing on the blue outline of the islands, I now involuntarily recalled their many voes, wild caves, and splintered skerries, alive with sea gulls and kittiwakes. The magnificent land-locked sound of Bressay too, where her Majesty’s fleet might ride in safety, and where Lerwick—the capital of the islands, and the most northerly town in the British dominions—with its quaint, foreign, gabled aspect, rises, crowning the heights, from the very water’s edge, so that sillacks might be fished from the windows of those houses next the sea. Boating excursions and pony scamperings are also recalled; the Noss Head, with its mural precipice rising sheer from the sea to a height of 700 feet, vividly reminding one of Edgar’s description of Dover Cliff, in “Lear,” or of that which Horatio pictured to Hamlet—
“The dreadful summit of the cliff,
That beetles o’er his base into the sea....
The very place puts toys of desperation,
Without more motive, into every brain
That looks so many fathoms to the sea,