Wanderung 21

Lands Ho! Scotland, England, Shetland, Iceland, Newfoundland

August - September 2009

Monday, September 21st, 2009: Lerwick, Shetland Islands

The morning started off with a chain of errors that could have led to a disastrously bad day, but fortunately things turned out much better by the end of the day. We picked up the pilot just outside the harbor at Lerwick and eased into the anchorage shortly before dawn. Monika and I both enjoy arriving in new ports of call, so we bounced up and hit the 13th deck to take pictures before having breakfast as soon as the Garden Cafe buffet opened at 6:30. (I never miss a meal on cruises, and despite that I still wonder why I gain weight!)

Lerwick does not have a dock that will accommodate a cruise ship, so the Jewel used the lifeboats to shift passengers from ship to shore. While we were having breakfast we saw the lifeboats being lowered into the water and milling around the ship, and shortly thereafter they advised passengers not on shore excursions to get the timed tickets for the tenders. We were signed up for a shore excursion where we would depart the Jewel as a group, so we didn't need any tender tickets and we patiently waited until 9:30 to go forward to the Stardust Theater and join our excursion group.

But just as we were getting ready to depart for the theater I got a call on our cabin phone saying that our shore excursion had been canceled due to the bus breaking down! So suddenly at the last minute all our plans were thrown into a cocked hat. We scrambled to collect our gear and check out the situation. At the Stardust Theater, Monika confirmed that our tour had indeed been canceled, so we walked back to belatedly get four tender tickets. After locating Lois and Phyllis having breakfast, we gave them two of the tickets and went downstairs to wait for the next available tender. By this time, however, all the shore excursion groups whose trips had NOT been canceled where getting onto the lifeboats ahead of us. So we ground our teeth in frustration as we watched group after group board ahead of us. In the end, we waited in line about half an hour before we finally were able to board a lifeboat and get ashore in Lerwick. Bloody frustrating!

Having planned to take the shore excursion, we had not, of course, made any alternate plans for seeing Lerwick on our own. Will we or nill we, we were completely "winging it". Noticing an old fort with muzzle-loading canons staring out through gun ports, we decided to walk up the aptly named "Commercial Street" and see that first. The fort turned out to be Fort Charlotte, built in the early 1700s to fortify the main harbor of the Shetland Islands. We had fun walking the ramparts and I took out my frustration at NCL by looking down the barrel of one of the cannons that was conveniently pointed straight at the Jewel!

The map on my GPS showed a loch or small lake just over the ridge on which the town of Lerwick is located, so we decided to walk over and take a gander at that. As we walked uphill we saw a pretty little church just down the street so we diverted to take a look see. Surprisingly, the "church" turned out to be a library housed in an old church building. The library was thoroughly modern but the conversion process had, thank goodness, spared the beautiful stained glass windows in the front and rear of the nave of the old church because they were very nicely executed pieces of artwork.

Being a thoroughly modern library, a free internet connection was provided and the good folks of Lerwick graciously allowed strangers to use those facilities. We signed on for a half an hour or so to check our email and send a "we are here" message to all our friends and family. Despite the fact that 20+ terminals were available, the internet room was jam-packed, mostly with us economic refugees from the sky-high prices of internet service on the Jewel (AKA: Cheapskates Anonymous).

Feeling that the day was at least economically, if not aesthetically, redeemed, we continued on our way. Monika had picked up a very nice complimentary map of Lerwick, Scalloway and Brae from the kind folks at the library. Unlike many "tourist" maps, it was a really detailed first-class map that helped us decided what to do with our unexpected day in Lerwick. The map showed us, for example, that a walking trail circled the loch on the other side of the ridge, so we decided to walk around the lake just for fun.

Serendipity struck as we ambled toward the lake. I saw a man with a "Tesco" shopping bag and we stopped to ask him where the nearest Tesco store was as the nearest grocery store listed by my GPS was 140 miles away in the Orkney Islands! The man turned out to be a German, so he gave Monika instructions in German and the store turned out to be just around the next bend at the head of Brei Wick Bay.

But we decided it made more sense to walk around the Loch of Clickimin first and then go shopping so that we wouldn't have to carry our groceries with us. That settled, we circled the loch widdershins (American: counter-clockwise) past some playing fields, a leisure center with a pool, and even a campsite although no one was camping there at the moment. As we walked around the loch, however, my eyes were consistently drawn to a low stone tower set on a peninsula in the middle of the lake.

The neck of land connecting the stone ruins to the mainland was so narrow that it was almost on an island. But I saw a path leading out to the ruins and I just had to have a look (curiosity killed the cat and all that). The ruins turned out to the the remains of a Bronze-age fortified settlement and I found them to be absolutely fascinating. The one approach to the island led through what looked like a series of old stone gates, and the entrances of the gates were deliberately offset, probably to help defend against invaders. But in 500 B.C. who would invade a set of islands that lay at least 100 miles from the nearest mainland?? And what in the world in the barren landscape would be worth fighting over?

Once we got through the gates, we found the central keep, which was much bigger than it looked from across the loch. In fact the keep was a double-walled tower of stones with enough space between them that they enclosed a stairway presumably used for defenders to mount the ramparts and defend the settlement. According to a nearby explanatory plaque, the tower of the central keep had stood about 30 feet high in its heyday, and that's just a huge amount of effort to invest in defensive fortifications unless the settlement was being severely threatened by invaders. But this was hundreds of years before the Vikings and their longships, so how did the attackers manage to even get to the Shetland Islands? My mind was teeming with unanswered questions prompted by seeing such a massive fortification in such an isolated and barren place.

The interior of the keep could only be reached by one narrow and low-ceilinged tunnel. Monika, being shorter, could traverse it just hunched over a bit but I had to really bend over double and even then could just barely squeeze through underneath the stone lintels. Inside it was deserted, of course, and really somewhat spooky. Just like the stone ruins of Chaco Canyon or Mesa Verde in the southwestern part of the U.S., you have all this magnificent, laboriously hand-hewn stonework bearing a mute testimony to the generations of people who lived, died, and ultimately deserted this place leaving just those mysterious questions in their wake.

I was very happy to have seen at least one Bronze Age ruin but thoroughly bemused by all my unanswered questions, I followed Monika over to the Tesco which was just a block or so down the street. There we found some nice pre-made sandwiches, bottled beer and low-fat potato chips (no pretzels) for lunch, plus some inexpensive wine for smuggling back aboard the Jewel. Walking across the street to the shore of Brei Wick Bay, we mopped some drops of water from a picnic bench and sat down to enjoy our lunch. We watched the waves crash in from the bay while we enjoyed our sandwiches, potato chips, beer (Monika) and water (me). I drank as much water as I could and then poured out the rest so that I could pour in the wine for the trip back aboard the ship. We "import" the wine in plastic bottles so there is no metal involved and it doesn't set off the metal detectors, which is a trick we learned from Jeff and Helen when we went walking with them in Cascais, Portugal, on Wanderung 17.

While we were consuming our lunch and watching the spectacular display of light and shadow on the waters of the bay, we noticed a walking path that seemed to follow the shoreline of the bay back around the Horse of the Knab, the headland our ship had passed when coming into port that morning. Figuring we still had enough time to walk that route and still get back to the ship before the all-aboard time of 3:30, we headed off that way after lunch.

Walking along the shore of the bay that way, we had marvelous views of the opposite shoreline. Out at the farthest point of the headland, we stopped to look at the sheer, picturesque cliffs of the Horse of the Knab. For some reason it reminded me of the Cliffs of Moher in Ireland although they are much higher and more sheer than the rock formations comprising the Horse of the Knab. Still, very pretty.

From the point we turned back toward downtown Lerwick, walking at the bottom of the Knab Burial Ground (Lerwick's cemetery). Once past the cemetery we started to glimpse the Jewel anchored out in the middle of the harbor. The clean, white lines of our cruise ship stood out strikingly against the dark blue waters of the harbor, the green of the hills, and the light blue sky. Continuing on into town we window-shopped a bit and then took the tender back to the ship.

The Jewel left port shortly after we reboarded. Returning to Deck 13, we took pictures of the harbor as the ship left port. We met Lois and Phyllis up there, and it turned out that they had spent the day in Lerwick, mostly shopping. Phyllis had splurged and bought a new, honest-to-gosh handcrafted-in-the-Shetlands sweater and we all admired the intricate and colorfully knitted pattern of that before returning inside for the evening.


 

Copyright 2010 by R. W. Holt and E. M. Holt
Index
Map of Scotland Map of England Map of Rest of Lands Epilog

August 2009
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September 2009
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13 14 15 16 17 18 19
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