This week’s travel dream: Scotland’s outermost isles

Scotland’s Northern Isles are “one of the earth’s great escapes,” said James Scudamore in Condé Nast Traveler. Few places can match the “purity of the elements, the raw natural beauty,” and the magnificent solitude that can be found on these “sea-lashed islands.” To reach the Orkney and Shetland archipelagos, you must first undertake a “legendarily grueling” ferry journey, during which 30-foot-high “slabs of water” can pummel the boat. I was “determined not to let the North Sea get the better of me, and tackled it head-on by drinking whiskey at a wildly seesawing bar.” It may have been that whiskey, but as we neared the islands, I felt as if I were about to step foot into another century.

The past resonates so powerfully on the Northern Isles because there isn’t much modern life to eclipse it. Neolithic structures on the Orkneys’ largest island (called “the Mainland”) include the mysterious Ring of Brodgar, which may date as far back as 2500 B.C. This giant circle of standing stones, built around the same time as Stonehenge, is a “far superior”—and far-less-frequented—place to enjoy a summer solstice. The “most famous inhabitants” of the Orkneys’ northernmost island, North Ronaldsay, are sheep. A breed unique to the island, they “scamper across the rocks with the agility of cats.” The only thing that ever seems to change here is the weather, and that changes all the time. Often, in a single vast view, you can “make out more than one weather system at a time: wisps of rain out to sea, rainbows smuggled behind black clouds, sunlight beaming a god-like finger on a distant house.”

Still, the Shetland Islands make the Orkneys look civilized. Craggy cliffs end abruptly, as if they were “falling off into the foaming water,” and much of the capital, Lerwick, was built on land reclaimed from the sea. As I explored the coastline, the town seemed to “shrink down to wedges and shelves of underwater rock.” Robert Louis Stevenson is said to have written Treasure Island following a visit to Shetland’s Unst island, and you can see why this remote landscape inspired such a work. Here, closer to the Arctic Circle than to London, you are the “most northerly creature in Britain.”

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Contact: Scotland.org