Muddy Bay Diaries (6)

Saturday evening
After we returned to the hotel, the Faroese quickly went to the bar before it closed. It was quite an interesting conversation, and although I’m not entirely sure how drunk Hjalmar was, it did make for some good comments. He wanted the Corpus Carminum Faroense to be parsed entirely because it would make a good corpus for historical linguistic research into Faroese. But he also thought it would be a good idea to tag everything for literary topic and function. Eyðun didn’t think that was quite necessary. This conversation alternated randomly with Hjalmar’s career plans about selling fish to Germans. All he needed was a fax, an internet connection and a mobile phone, apparently. Another one of the Faroese tried talking to me but I didn’t understand a word of his drunken babble.

Sunday
Sunday was a sightseeing tour of the South Mainland of Shetland. First stop was the Crofters Museum, which is a little crofters cottage that they’ve done up. It’s supposed to give you an idea of how the crofters lived. Except this cottage was about twice the size of all the other cottages of which the ruins are still scattered across the fields. It was quite nice though, but that may have been a result of the extremely good weather. Imagine living there with the usual Shetland weather of rain coming horizontally at you with the speed of an intercity train... They also had a little water mill a bit further down the hill. Quite idyllic.

Next stop: Old Scatness, which they claim is an iron age village. Or a Pictish settlement. They were still busy reconstructing it, so a large part of the terrain was heaps of stones held together by plastic and sand bags. The one building that was finished had a peat fire in it that was particularly smoky that day, so perhaps not advisable to go inside. When the guide at Scatness started telling about their little vegetable garden, I kind of lost interest. Apparently, the Picts had little gardens where they cultivated nettles, dandelions and other things that we call weeds because they grow everywhere. The woman was saying that they do indeed grow everywhere, and they take root wherever you just chuck the weeds, but if you try planting them they die. Maybe that’s a sign that these people didn’t actually have dandelion gardens but if they needed dandelions for anything, they’d just go into the fields and pluck a few kilos?

The airport which was right beside Old Scatness was a much nicer view. They’d just extended the East-West runway at the cost of half a million pounds per metre or something ridiculous. This also means the runway now crosses the road. There are no beams or anything, just a traffic sign saying ‘Positively no stopping on or deviating from this road, by order. Sumburgh Airport Authority.’ There didn’t seem to be an airplane coming so I stood on the runway. It’s impressively short, and you really hope they’d brake more than they did... otherwise it’s right back into the sea.

There was a quick stop at the hotel next to Jarlshof, where they have excavated an old Viking settlement, and then it was on to Sumburgh Head, the southernmost point of Shetland, to eat the lunch we had collected at the hotel. Great views, lots of birds (seagulls are scarily big!) and almost no wind, which was scary.

The tour was concluded at St Ninian’s Isle. The island is connected to the mainland through a narrow strip of sand. In the 1870s they decided that it was much more profitable to have sheep on St Ninian’s Isle than people, so they cleared the island and filled it back up again with sheep. That’s still the situation today. The strip of sand overflows regularly but not at every high tide, or the tide had been low for unnaturally long, because the seaweed on the beach was totally dried out. We had a look at the ruins of the church of St Ninian’s Isle, and I decided to head to the top of the hill so I could have a clear view of Foula. (That’s the peat bog on a rock, and apparently the most outlying island of Britain, although JW and I had decided that it wasn’t. Not the most outlying. They’re probably right about the peat.) But the hill kept on going and going and going and I never seemed to get to the top so I stood on a little wall, saw Foula and left it at that.

That evening was the conference dinner. Not a cold buffet but a proper dinner! I had spinach and potato soup first, then Shetland lamb, and finished with strawberry cheese cake. About time for some decent food too!

Monday
The return flight was a lot less eventful than the trip to Shetland. The airplane was now green and had the Loganair logo on it, so Klaske and I decided that the other one must have given up completely and they’d just used another one. (They do use the same airplane all the time, apparently.) They put me at the emergency exit which I’m never too happy about but (a) I fly too little to remember to request a window seat not at the emergency exit, and (b) there wasn’t any other place left so I got stuck there. Fortunately everything went well, we managed to land and lift off again in Wick, and we were in Edinburgh before I knew it. Might have slept for a bit actually...

All in all a nice trip, a good conference and a good experience. I’ve already been invited back to Shetland and back to the Faroes. I just might.