Orkney and Shetland lie off the northern tip of Scotland — Orkney about ten miles from the mainland, Shetland a further hundred miles north. Both are Scottish, and both are considerably less Scottish in culture than the map implies.
Norse, not Gaelic
The islands were settled by Norse people from the eighth century and were Norwegian territory for six hundred years. Gaelic was never spoken here; the language until the eighteenth century was Norn, a Scandinavian tongue descended from Old Norse, and its vocabulary survives in dialect, place names and everyday speech.
Islanders will often distinguish themselves from Scots as much as from the English, and Shetland in particular flies its own flag — a white Nordic cross on blue, deliberately echoing Scandinavian designs rather than the Saltire.
The unpaid dowry
The islands became Scottish through a defaulted debt. In 1469, Christian I of Denmark and Norway agreed to a marriage between his daughter Margaret and James III of Scotland, with a substantial dowry. He could not raise the money, and pledged Orkney and then Shetland as security.
The debt was never paid and the islands were annexed to Scotland. Denmark made several later attempts to redeem the pledge and was refused. The point is raised in Shetland to this day, usually with a smile and not entirely as a joke.
Orkney
Green, fertile and low-lying, with around 70 islands of which some 20 are inhabited. Its extraordinary feature is archaeology — the Heart of Neolithic Orkney is a World Heritage Site containing:
- Skara Brae — a stone-built village of around 3180 BC, older than Stonehenge and the Pyramids, preserved under sand until a storm uncovered it in 1850. The stone furniture — beds, dressers, hearths — is still in place.
- Maeshowe — a chambered tomb aligned so the setting midwinter sun shines down the entrance passage. Its walls carry Viking graffiti, carved by Norsemen who broke in seeking shelter.
- The Ring of Brodgar and the Stones of Stenness — stone circles of enormous scale.
Scapa Flow, the great natural harbour, was the main British naval anchorage in both world wars, and the German High Seas Fleet was scuttled there in 1919. The wrecks are among the finest dive sites in Europe.
Shetland
Further north than Bergen and treeless, with dramatic cliffs, enormous seabird colonies and a landscape of peat and heather. Around 100 islands, 16 inhabited.
Its most famous event is Up Helly Aa in Lerwick each January — a fire festival in which a thousand torch-bearing participants in Viking costume drag a replica galley through the streets and burn it. It is Victorian in origin rather than genuinely Norse, and none the less spectacular for it.
Shetland also has the Shetland pony, the Shetland sheepdog, and a knitting tradition — Fair Isle patterning — known worldwide.
Oil, wind and midsummer
North Sea oil transformed both islands from the 1970s, with the Sullom Voe terminal in Shetland among the largest in Europe. Both now have substantial wind energy, and Orkney has been a world testbed for tidal and wave power.
In midsummer neither gets properly dark — Shetlanders call the lingering twilight the simmer dim — and in midwinter there are barely six hours of daylight.