Laurie Goodlad’s pick of the Shetlands
This past season has taken us from Orkney to Glasgow, Edinburgh to the north coast, around the highlands and islands and many places in between.
This is our final episode for season two and joining me to share their perfect day is Laurie Goodlad.
Laurie is on instagram as Shetland With Laurie.
She is Shetland born and raised and can trace her ancestry back hundreds of years.
She has lived in Shetland for all but four years of her life - when at university in Dundee.
Laurie has written for the Lonely Planet and featured on travel shows, blogs and tourism campaigns. She’s also part-time curator of Scalloway Museum.
“This perfect day is lasting for five days! I'm just telling you all my favourite places to visit.
One thing in the south mainland that everybody has got to do whenever you're coming to Shetland, is you have to visit the Mousa Broch.
Mousa is an island which is off the east coast of the south mainland.
It's an uninhabited island, an RSPB nature reserve, and you can do a boat trip over there from May to September. The boat goes every day at 11. 30 and it's £18 per person. Go in on the boat, the boat leaves you on the island for three hours.
And you can walk out to the broch, which is a 2000 year old Iron Age round tower. And it's the best broch in the whole of Scotland, the whole of the world.
You won't find a better preserved example of it anywhere else.
You find these broch, these Iron Age structures, all through the north and the west of Scotland.
And it's incredible. It stands at 13 metres tall. And you can go inside and it has a stone staircase that leads all the way to the top. You can go and stand on the top of this 2000 year old building. And it's just, it's incredible. The island is amazing. It's filled with wildlife, seabirds, seals.
And then, if you're here at midsummer, throughout June and early July, you can do an evening tour into the island, which goes in at 10.30pm and it takes you in to see the storm petrels, which are a tiny seabird, and they return to their nesting site every evening, kind of when the sun sets.
They nest within the broch walls, so as the sun sets at midsummer, around about half eleven at night, then these birds start returning and swirling around this giant Iron Age tower before they find their nest site. It's an amazing kind of culmination of nature and archaeology. That would be something else on this magical day too.
When I go to Mousa Broch I look up and you're imagining 2000 years ago, all the machinery that they didn't have at that time and just how, how they did it.
How many people did it take to build it? How long did it take? You can look at it and realise that every single stone there had to be like placed by the hand of somebody thousands of years ago.
And how many people it's seen in that 2000 years?
How many people have lived there or visited?
In the Viking sagas we hear about the eloping lovers who run away to the Mousa Broch and, just what was it used for?
It's still a mystery. Archaeologists are still divided on what their purpose was.
We look at the buildings that are going up today and you do have to wonder what will they look like in 2000 years?
They'll probably just not be here. And how will history judge what we're building and doing today?”
Laurie’s perfect day:
Where: Yell, Hermaness, Jarlshoff, Mousa Broch, Eshaness
Food and drink: Bacon and egg roll, lunch at Sumburgh Hotel, Busta House or No88 for dinner featuring local produce
Music: North Ness Boys, any Shetland fiddle music
