Them and Unst

THE Shetlands embrace around 100 islands, 15 occupied, arms-length appended to maps of Great Britain like the mugshot of a long distant cousin in the forgotten corner of a favourite family photograph.

In those 1,468 square kilometres there are just 22,000 people, numbers falling like a broken barometer.

The islands are 60 degrees north, much the same latitude as Anchorage in Alaska or Greenland's southern shores, closer to Bergen than to Aberdeen and almost wilfully windswept.

The record, Britain's record, is 190mph. In the summer it's barely dark, in the winter you can hardly see a hand in front of you.

Unst, the most northerly inhabited, is marketed as "The island above all others". Muckle Flugga lighthouse, higher yet, towers 157ft feet above the sea yet the waves still regularly wash over it.

The Shetlands have eight modern leisure centres, each with an indoor swimming pool funded from oil's sumptuous wells, and there's a semi-Scandinavian dialect in which "This and that" becomes "Dis and dat", like a Nordic Little Plum.

While mainland Britain endured its wettest June since records began, Shetland enjoyed its second driest. It's among the reasons that the Islands are so different, why we've just had the most wonderful week's holiday up there and why it's supposed - probably by some smarty- pants marketing man - that Robert Louis Stevenson based his map of Treasure Island on Unst.

They could save their breath for cooling their cockaleekie. Unst's treasures are self-evident.

We travelled by car to Scrabster, near Thurso, by sea to Orkney and then eight hours by ferry to Lerwick, the Shetland capital. From the Shetland mainland it's another short ferry crossing to the island of Yell and yet another to Unst

The Shetlands take "most northerly" to extremes. Lerwick boasts - positively boasts - the most northerly barber shop and the most northerly Chinese takeaway; Baltasound, on Unst, has the most northerly pub and the most northerly post office and at Haroldswick, just before Britain comes to a full stop, is the great country's most northerly church.

The last Methodist church was blown down in 1992, a quick 107mph blast. This one's simply amazing, ingeniously designed, almost Scandinavian, ever-open. The pastor's a 78-year-old layman from Langley Park, west of Durham, a farmer's son who used to deliver Bobby Robson's milk.

Douglas Graham arrived in 1990, on a three-year contract. He's organist, too. "I just seemed to stay," he says, a man accustomed to living on the edge.

For 20 years he was co-warden of the Marygate Centre on Holy Island; teaching religious education in Washington, Tyne and Wear, may also qualify.

"There was work to be done here," he says.

The Vikings had landed at Haroldswick 1,200 years before him, said on an information board in the Unst heritage centre to have regarded the Shetlands as the promised land. Meteorologically, at least, it may not have said much for Norway.

Douglas Graham had never been there until he saw the job advertised, with the honest prophesy that the old church might have to be knocked down before it fell down.

Tom Wilkinson, recently retired from the Crook Methodist circuit, had also been on Unst. Les Hann, latterly in Weardale, was at Scalloway, on the Shetland mainland. So far as the Methodist church was concerned, it may have been a case of them and Unst.

The island's 12 miles by five, the population halved to 500 since Douglas arrived. In summer there are also 25,000 pairs of breeding puffins, 100,000 other birds and quite a lot of ponies, one-trick or otherwise.

In the church office, there's a lovely photograph of a winter sunrise. It'll be about 10am, says Douglas, and setting again four hours later.

A single man, also in charge of the church on Yell, he lives in a bungalow by the bay and admits arriving as the innocent abroad. "I was a farmer's son who knew nothing about farming; I probably related more to the fishing.

"One of the big surprises was that things I remembered from childhood were still being done here. They were cutting corn with a scythe, still tying by hand."

Then as now, they still cut peat, too. Unst is croft original.

Necessarily resourceful, remarkably flexible, the islanders did most of the building work on the new church themselves. Only the roof was done by professionals; only the roof needs replacing.

Douglas is enthusiastically getting on with it, proud to be regarded as a Shetlander. "It's a wonderful community here," he says. "Everyone knows each other to a certain extent; the amount of things which go in the winter is amazing.

"The wind can get up, it can be quite cold but there's not much snow any more. You miss daylight but really you don't notice the dark; you just get on with life.

"There are multiple problems. There's not enough work here for the younger people and in any case, Shetland educates them too well. They want to move on."

Familiar in wartime, the Saxa Vode RAF station closed last year, an event thought not to have been accelerated by a NATO exercise in the 1980s in which the base was "captured" with all the ease of an Aberdonian bully taking granny sookers from a we'an. The MoD found some rolls of barbed wire after that.

Douglas Graham, a man manifestly happy - Methodism in his madness - will from next year spend half his time in a Northumberland cottage recently bequeathed him. It'll be good to see trees again, he says, but he needs also to think of the time when he may no longer be able to drive. "It's a bit hard if you can't drive on Unst."

Even on his own treasure island, the future worries him. "The way things are going, there's no certainty that anyone would come here to replace me. I have to say that I'd encourage them to; the past 17 years have been truly wonderful."

A long way from Durham

IN a kirk on a byway to heaven, we trip across a leaflet about the Shetland Environmental Awards. Among the winners - serendipity squared - is John Best, Durham lad.

John and his wife Betty have spent 35 years on Fair Isle, somewhere midway between Orkney and Shetland and Britain's most remote inhabited island.

He sounds exactly like Douglas Graham. "I just seemed to stay," he says.

We never quite made Fair Isle, of course. It's two-and-a-half hours, twice a week, by boat from the southern Shetland mainland, 25 minutes on a wing and Loganair.

"The biggest drawback," says John, "is that you need a second mortgage if you want to visit anywhere else. It's quite horrendous."

Fair Isle's three miles by one-and-a-half, treeless and exposed, population 70. A dozen of them, unequalled, are members of the Best family.

John's son and daughter both returned, now with six children of their own. Another son lives on Shetland's south mainland. "It's the total opposite of what's happening on most lonely islands," he says. "My family were very happy to come back."

John was born in Seaham and raised in Durham City, where his sister still lives. Both he and Betty were in the nursing profession - it was she who became the nurse on Fair Isle.

The island's been owned since 1954 by the National Trust of Scotland, an internationally acclaimed bird haven and observatory - the environmental award was for creating a wetland area for waders and ducks - though there are also 240 different plant species.

The school has eight pupils and also publishes a term time weekly newspaper for the island. There's a nurse and a special constable, though hardly anyone knows who he is, and a steady gulf stream of international visitors to the harbour.

"The way the island works is that we're just one large family, a real community," says John. "We do everything and anything, everyone helps one another, that's the way of life. I really can't remember when last there was a crime."

He's an ordained but unpaid Methodist minister - "those few minutes in the pulpit are the only time the folk don't contradict me" - crofter, builder, artist, marine environmentalist and much else. His son's a boat builder; his daughter is post-mistress and runs the shop with her husband, drives the airstrip fire engine - a task for which she attends courses at Teesside Airport - and is also a qualified nurse.

None has plans to leave. Fair Isle set fair.

JOHN Pritchard, until recently Bishop of Jarrow and now Bishop of Oxford, collects photographs of unusual place names. One of the classics missing from his collection was just up the road from where we stayed on Shetland. Mavis Grind is Nordic for "the narrow gate to the isthmus", and it's said that you can throw a cricket ball from the Atlantic Ocean on one side of it to the North Sea on the other. An image is on the way to Oxford.

MUCKLE Roe, literally the big red island, was until the 1920s connected to mainland Shetland by stepping stones. Then they built a bridge, widened in 1948. The plaque confirms what many forget - that it was Zetland, not Shetland, County Council.

The Earl of Zetland was also a much loved ferry, bombed by the Germans, which survived until replaced in 1973 by a car ferry to the northern isles.

Lord Zetland, of course, still lives at Aske Hall, near Richmond, and has extensive interests elsewhere, not least around Redcar. A tour guide, however, insisted that it should be Shetland - "Someone misread the German 'S' on a document. Zetland should never have existed."

THOSE who regard all these media awards as a little, well, spurious, would have been interested in the Shetland Independent - its masthead proclaiming it to be the Highland and Islands independent magazine of the year. It was issue number one.

... it was a huge shock on returning from holiday to hear of the sudden serious illness of Andrea Savino, who ran a wonderful Italian restaurant - eponymous and idiosyncratic - in Shildon. On Monday he died. No one's passing has ever attracted more e-mails and telephone calls. Andrea was a lovely man and a great character. More of him in next Tuesday's Eating Owt.

The eccentric place to wait

SCENIC Shetland notwithstanding, there's one attraction almost guaranteed to halt travellers in their tracks. It's the bus shelter near Baltasound, on Unst - see picture left - and it is to bus shelters what Kew Gardens is to public parks.

The 2007 edition of the Shetland Visitor reckons that it's Britain's most northerly, too, though pole place for improbability could be claimed for several other reasons.

Scotland's bus shelters seem particularly prosaic, uniform and utilitarian, the only whiff of excitement the notice suggesting that fellow travellers snitch on those who smoke. This one's magnificently different, the road sign to Keen of Hamer perhaps an indication of one of Unst's natural wonders but quite likely a salute to the glorious loon who dreamed the whole thing up.

This year's colour scheme is yellow, which explains the clerestory curtains, the nasturtiums, the wall hangings, the proggy mat, the cushions and the cushion covers, the ingenious mobile, the elderly lemon, the sundry suntan lotions, and the shelf of books, all with a yellow spine.

One's called Tell Me a Swiss Joke, the scurrilous suggestion that the Swiss may be humourless, an example inviting the definition of a trio. "The Moscow Symphony Orchestra after returning from a concert tour of Switzerland."

There's a television, though someone in the visitors' book has complained that it can't get BBC2, a microwave oven, a radio and a yellow feather duster with which to keep them all clean. Though there's no telephone, there's still a directory. It's Yellow Pages, of course.

The Shetland Visitor had also promised home-made cakes, but it may not have been Baltasound baking day.

Someone else in the visitors' book wonders when the No 6 to Herne Bay is going to arrive - a bit like waiting for the service 28 at Scotch Corner, then - another grumbles that he's been to that surgery every day for a month and still hasn't seen a doctor.

It's signed by incredulous visitors from around the world, by Mike Thompson and Brian Scott from Co Durham and by the Bognor Regis Evening Trefoil Guild, who appear duly to have been grateful.

All it seems to lack is a bus timetable or indeed buses, though there's supposed to be one a day up from Lerwick. It hardly matters. In life's helter-shelter, this truly is mellow yellow.